IRLF 


B    M    101 


DAMN!   •  A  BOOK 
OF   CALUMNY  • 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

IN  DEFENSE  OF  WOMEN 


DAMN! 

Book  of  Calumny 

BY    H  •  L  •  MENCKEN 


PHILIP  GOODMAN    •   NEWYORK   •    1918 


COPYRIGHT  1918  BY 
PHILIP  GOODMAN  COMPANY 


bourth  Edition 


: 


PREFACE 

The  title  borne  by  this  little  book  was 
not  my  invention,  and  got  my  imprimatur 
only  rather  grudgingly  and  at  the  last 
moment.  I  consented  to  it,  in  fact,  simply 
to  avoid  a  long  and  costly  telegraphic 
debate  with  the  publisher,  from  whom  I 
was  separated  by  200  miles.  The  "Damn" 
part  seemed  to  me  to  be  too  heavily  dev 
ilish  and  sforzando — a  fit  label  for  a  book 
by  a  sensational  gentleman  of  God  or  a 
wicked  college  professor.  As  for  the 
"Book  of  Calumny"  part,  it  plainly  mis 
represented  the  work  itself,  which  is 
chiefly  devoted,  not  to  calumniating 
things,  but  to  defending  and  praising 
them.  Thus,  I  even  go  so  far  as  to  speak 
for  alcohol,  war  and  the  Jews,  all  of  which 
are  usually  execrated.  Still  more,  I  argue 
that  99  per  cent,  of  the  married  men  of  ' 
America  are  faithful  to  their  wives :  a  doc 
trine  absolutely  novel,  and  so  much  at 


M745O27 


odds  with  current  superstition  as  to  appear 
almost  ironical. 

So  the  title,  from  the  start,  has  libelled 
the  book,  which  is  moral  and  reassuring 
in  character,  and  not  only  libelled  it,  but 
also  brought  down  upon  it  the  indignation 
of  the  right-thinking.  For  example,  the 
New  York  Times,  after  printing  one  ad 
vertisement  of  it,  refused  to  print  any 
more — on  the  sound  ground  that  a  book 
so  named,  and  of  contents  fitting  the  title, 
would  surely  outrage  the  pruderies  of  its 
subscribers.  Again,  a  great  many  news 
paper  critics,  too  hard  worked  to  read  so 
small  a  book,  wrote  their  reviews  upon  its 
cover,  and  so  fell  into  lamentable  misrep 
resentations.  Thus  the  critic  of  the  Salt 
Lake  Republican  called  it  "devilishly 
slanderous,"  where  its  actual  tone,  as  I 
have  said,  is  one  of  encomium  and  inspira 
tion.  Thus  the  critic  of  the  Philadelphia 
Public  Ledger  described  it  as  full  of 
"foolish  things"  said  in  "moments  of  exas 
peration,"  whereas  there  is  not  the  slight 
est  sign  of  exasperation  in  it,  but  only  a 


mellow  forbearance.  Thus  the  Spring 
field  Republican  denounced  it  as  "cyn 
ical  and  immoral,"  and  the  St.  Louis 
Post-Dispatch  as  "written  by  a  pessimist 
solely  for  pessimists,"  and  the  Chicago 
Daily  News  as  "strutting  and  squalling," 
whereas  it  is  obviously  not  cynical  or  im 
moral  or  pessimistic,  but  full  of  high  hope 
and  rectitude,  and  not  strutting  and 
squalling,  but  extremely  polite  and  pia 
nissimo.  Finally,  various  estimable  view 
ers  with  alarm,  mistaking  its  theology  for 
politics,  complained  of  it  as  seditious, 
whereas  the  plain  fact  is  that  its  very  first 
chapter  is  given  over  to  a  defense  of 
George  Washington. 

In  order  to  dispose  of  such  misunder 
standings  I  have  been  tempted  to  change 
the  title,  but  to  this  the  publisher  objects. 
Part  of  his  objection  is  perfectly  logical : 
the  change  would  put  him  to  expense  and 
expose  him  to  the  charge  of  trying  to  sell 
the  same  book  twice.  But  part  of  it,  I 
fancy,  is  also  due  to  considerations  a  good 
deal  less  benign.  A  book  violently  en- 

vii 


titled  has  plain  advantages,  on  the  book- 
.  counters,  over  books  more  decorous ;  it 
arrests  the  eye  and  gives  wings  to  the  dol 
lar.  Perhaps  some  such  notion  floats  in 
my  own  mind,  too,  and  so  accounts  for  my 
own  complaisance ;  I  am  also  a  hypocrite . 
But  after  all  it  is  a  small  matter.  The  sub 
stance  of  the  work  is  moral  enough,  and  it 
can  stand  an  inappropriate  title.  Who 
really  cares  what  the  title  is?  Who  really 
cares,  indeed,  what  the  book  is?  In  all  the 
range  of  nature  there  is  no  phenomenon 
intrinsically  more  trivial.  Not  one  book 
in  a  thousand  is  worth  as  much  to  man 
kind  as  an  innocent  little  child  or  a  Chi 
cago  ham.  Not  all  the  books  written  in  a 
y  century  have  impinged  upon  human  his 
tory  as  potently  as  the  invention  of  the 
bichloride  tablet. 

Several  reviewers  have  speculated  as  to 
my  reasons  for  printing  a  volume  so  odd 
in  size  and  make  up — a  few  score  casual 
essays,  some  longish,  some  telegraphically 
brief,  scarcely  two  hanging  together.  My 
explanation  is  very  simple.  It  was  thus 

viii 


that  the  thing  came  into  my  mind,  and  I 
saw  no  good  reason  for  laboring  it  into 
some  other  form.  I  said  what  I  had  to 
say  upon  each  topic  that  presented  itself, 
and  then  shut  down.  If  any  other  ideas 
ever  occur  to  me  I  shall  simply  write 
another  book. 

MENCKEN. 

Baltimore,  July,  1918. 


CONTENTS 

Preface  v 

I  Pater  Patriae  13 

II  The  Reward  of  the  Artist  16 

III  The  Heroic  Considered  17 

IV  The  Burden  of  Humor  18 
V  The  Saving  Grace 

VI  Moral  Indignation  23 

VII  Stable-Names  24 

VIII  The  Jews  30 

IX  The  Comstockian  Premiss  34 

X  The  Labial  Infamy  35 

XI  A  True  Ascetic  42 

XII  On  Lying  45 

XIII  History  47 

XIV  The  Curse  of  Civilization  49 
XV  Eugenics  50 

XVI  The  Jocose  Gods  52 

XVII  War  53 

XVIII  Moralist  and  Artist  55 

XIX  Actors  57 

XX  The  Crowd  64 

XXI  An  American  Philosopher  68 

XXII  Clubs  69 

XXIII  Fidelis  ad  Urnum  71 

XXIV  A  Theological  Mystery  73 
XXV  The  Test  of  Truth  74 

XXVI  Literary  Indecencies  75 

XXVII  Virtuous  Vandalism  77 


XXVIII  A  Footnote  on  the  Duel  of 

Sex  82 

XXIX  Alcohol  87 

XXX  Thoughs  on  the  Voluptuous  91 

XXXI  The  Holy  Estate  93 

XXXII  Dichtung  und  Wahrheit  94 

XXXIII  Wild  Shots  96 

XXXIV  Beethoven  98 
XXXV  The  Tone  Art  101 

XXXVI  Zoos  109 

XXXVII  On  Hearing  Mozart  118 

XXXVIII  The  Road  to  Doubt  119 

XXXIX  A  New  Use  for  Churches  120 

XL  The  Root  of  Religion  123 

XLI  Free  Will  124 

XLII  Quid  est  Veritas?  129 

XLIII  The  Doubter's  Reward  130 

XLIV  Before  the  Altar  132 

XLV  The  Mask  133 

XLVI  Pia  Veneziani,  Poi  Cristiani  134 

XLVII  Off  Again,  On  Again  136 

XLVIII  Theology  137 

XLIX  Exempli  Gratia  139 


DAMN!  -A  BOOK 
OF   •  CALUMNY 

i. 

PATER  PATRICE 

If  George  Washington  were  alive 
today,  what  a  shining  mark  he  would  be 
for  the  whole  camorra  of  uplifters, 
forward-lookers  and  other  such  inspired 
Bolsheviki!  He  was  the  Rockefeller  of 
his  time,  the  richest  man  in  the  United 
States,  a  promoter  of  companies,  a  land- 
magnate,  an  exploiter  of  mines  and  tim 
ber.  He  had  a  liking  for  all  forthright  and 
pugnacious  men,  and  a  contempt  for  law 
yers,  reformers  and  other  such  obscurant 
ists.  He  was  not  pious.  He  drank  whisky 
whenever  he  felt  chilly,  and  kept  a  jug  of 
it  handy.  He  knew  far  more  profanity 
than  Scripture,  and  used  and  enjoyed  it 
more.  He  had  no  belief  in  the  infallible 
wisdom  of  the  lower  classes,  but  regarded 
them  as  inflammatory  dolts,  and  tried  to 
save  the  republic  from  them.  He  advo- 

13 


cated  no  sure  cure  for  all  the  sorrows  of 
the  world,  and  doubted  that  such  a 
panacea  existed.  He  took  no  interest  in 
the  private  morals  of  his  neighbors. 

Inhabiting  These  States  today,  George 
would  be  ineligible  to  any  office  of  honor 
or  profit.  The  Senate  would  never  dare 
confirm  him;  the  President  could  not 
think  of  nominating  him.  He  would  be 
on  trial  in  all  the  yellow  journals  for 
belonging  to  the  Invisible  Government, 
the  Hell  Hounds  of  Plutocracy,  the 
Money  Power,  the  Interests.  The  Sher 
man  Act  would  have  him  in  its  toils ;  he 
would  be  under  indictment  by  every  grand 
jury  south  of  the  Potomac ;  the  triumphant 
prohibitionists  of  his  native  state  would 
be  denouncing  him  (he  had  a  still  at 
Mount  Vernon)  as  a  debaucher  of  youth, 
a  recruiting  officer  for  insane  asylums,  a 
poisoner  of  the  home.  The  suffragettes 
would  be  on  his  trail,  with  sentinels  posted 
all  along  the  Accotink  road.  The  initia 
tors  and  ref erendors  would  be  bawling  for 
his  blood.  The  young  college  men  of  the 

14 


Nation  and  the  New  Republic  would  be 
lecturing  him  weekly.  He  would  be  used 
to  scare  children  in  Kansas  and  Arkansas. 
The  chautauquas  would  shiver  whenever 
his  name  was  mentioned.  .  .  . 

And  what  a  chance  there  would  be  for 
that  ambitious  young  district  attorney 
who  thought  to  shadow  the  greatest  man 
the  New  World  has  ever  produced — and 
grab  him  under  the  Mann  Act! 


15 


II 

THE  REWARD  OF  THE  ARTIST 

A  man  labors  and  fumes  for  a  whole 
year  to  write  a  symphony  in  G  minor.  He 
puts  enormous  diligence  into  it,  and  much 
talent,  and  maybe  no  little  downright 
genius.  It  draws  his  blood  and  wrings  his 
soul.  He  dies  in  it  that  he  may  live  again. 
.  .  .  Nevertheless,  its  final  value,  in  the 
open  market  of  the  world,  is  a  great  deal 
less  than  that  of  a  fur  overcoat,  half  a 
Rolls-Royce  automobile,  or  a  handful  of 
authentic  hair  from  the  whiskers  of 
Henry  Wadsworth  Longfellow. 


16 


Ill 

THE  HEROIC  CONSIDERED 
For  humility  and  poverty,  in  them 
selves,  the  world  has  little  liking  and  less 
respect.  In  the  folk-lore  of  all  races,  de 
spite  the  sentimentalization  of  abasement 
for  dramatic  effect,  it  is  always  power  and 
grandeur  that  count  in  the  end.  The 
whole  point  of  the  story  of  Cinderella,the 
most  widely  and  constantly  charming  of 
all  stories,  is  that  the  Fairy  Prince  lifts 
Cinderella  above  her  cruel  sisters  and 
stepmother,  and  so  enables  her  to  lord  it 
over  them.  The  same  idea  underlies  prac 
tically  all  other  folk-stories :  the  essence  of 
each  of  them  is  to  be  found  in  the  ultimate 
triumph  and  exaltation  of  its  protagonist. 
And  of  the  real  men  and  women  of  his 
tory,  the  most  venerated  and  envied  are 
those  whose  early  humiliations  were  but 
preludes  to  terminal  glories;  for  example, 
Lincoln,  Whittington,  Franklin,  Jackson, 
Columbus,  Demosthenes,  Frederick  the 
Great,  Catherine,  Mary  of  Magdala, 

17 


Moses.  Even  the  Man  of  Sorrows, 
cradled  in  a  manger  and  done  to  death  be 
tween  two  thieves,  is  seen,  as  we  part  from 
Him  at  last,  in  a  situation  of  stupendous 
magnificence,  with  infinite  power  in  His 
hands.  Even  the  Beatitudes,  in  the  midst 
of  their  eloquent  counselling  of  renuncia 
tion,  give  it  unimaginable  splendor  as  its 
reward.  The  meek  shall  inherit — what? 
The  whole  earth!  And  the  poor  in  spirit? 
They  shall  sit  upon  the  right  hand  of  God ! 


18 


IV 

THE  BURDEN  OF  HUMOR 

What  is  the  origin  of  the  prejudice 
against  humor?  Why  is  it  so  dangerous, 
if  you  would  keep  the  public  confidence, 
to  make  the  public  laugh?  Is  it  because 
humor  and  sound  sense  are  essentially  an 
tagonistic?  Has  humanity  found  by  expe 
rience  that  the  man  who  sees  the  fun  of 
life  is  unfitted  to  deal  sanely  with  its  prob 
lems?  I  think  not.  No  man  had  more  of 
the  comic  spirit  in  him  than  William 
Shakespeare,  and  yet  his  serious  reflec 
tions,  by  the  sheer  force  of  their  sublime 
obviousness,  have  pushed  their  way  into 
the  race's  arsenal  of  immortal  platitudes. 
So,  too,  with  jEsop,  and  with  Balzac,  and 
with  Dickens,  to  come  down  the  scale. 
All  of  these  men  were  fundamentally 
humorists,  and  yet  all  of  them  achieved 
what  the  race  has  come  to  accept  as  a 
penetrating  sagacity.  Contrariwise,  many 
a  haloed  pundit  has  had  his  occasional 
guffaw.  Lincoln,  had  there  been  no  Civil 

19 


War,  might  have  survived  in  history 
chiefly  as  the  father  of  the  American 
smutty  story — the  only  original  art-form 
that  America  has  yet  contributed  to  litera 
ture.  Huxley,  had  he  not  been  the  great 
est  intellectual  duellist  of  his  age,  might 
have  been  its  greatest  satirist.  Bismarck, 
pursuing  the  gruesome  trade  of  politics, 
concealed  the  devastating  wit  of  Moliere ; 
his  surviving  epigrams  are  truly  stupend 
ous,  and  a  Frenchman,  Jules  Hoche,  has 
written  a  whole  book  on  his  larger  buf 
fooneries.  Finally,  Beethoven,  after  soar 
ing  to  the  heights  of  tragedy  in  the  first 
movement  of  the  Fifth  Symphony,  turned 
to  the  sardonic  bull-fiddling  of  the 
scherzo. 

No,  there  is  not  the  slightest  dis 
harmony  between  sense  and  nonsense, 
humor  and  respectability,  despite  the  skit 
tish  tendency  to  assume  that  there  is.  But, 
why,  then,  that  widespread  error? 
What  actual  fact  of  life  lies  behind  it, 
giving  it  a  specious  appearance  of  reason 
ableness?  None  other,  I  am  convinced, 

20 


than  the  fact  that  the  average  man  is  far 
too  stupid  to  make  a  joke.  He  may  see  a 
joke  and  love  a  joke,  particularly  when  it 
floors  and  flabbergasts  some  person  he 
dislikes,  but  the  only  way  he  can  himself 
take  part  in  the  priming  and  pointing  of 
a  new  one  is  by  acting  as  its  target.  In 
brief,  his  personal  contact  with  humor 
tends  to  fill  him  with  an  accumulated 
sense  of  disadvantage,  of  pricked  compla 
cency,  of  sudden  and  crushing  defeat;  and 
so,  by  an  easy  psychological  process,  he  is 
led  into  the  idea  that  the  thing  itself  is  in 
compatible  with  true  dignity  of  character 
and  intellect.  Hence  his  deep  suspicion  of 
jokers,  however  adept  their  thrusts.  "What 
a  damned  fool!" — this  same  half-pitying 
tribute  he  pays  to  wit  and  butt  alike.  He 
cannot  separate  the  virtuoso  of  comedy 
from  his  general  concept  of  comedy  itself, 
and  that  concept  is  inextricably  mingled 
with  memories  of  foul  ambuscades  and 
mortifying  hurts.  And  so  it  is  not  often 
that  he  is  willing  to  admit  any  wisdom 
in  a  humorist,  or  to  condone  frivolity  in 
a  sage. 

21 


V 

THE  SAVING  GRACE 

Let  us  not  burn  the  universities — yet. 
After  all,  the  damage  they  do  might  be 
worse.  .  .  .  Suppose  Oxford  had  snared 
and  disemboweled  Shakespeare!  Sup 
pose  Harvard  had  rammed  its  buttermilk 
into  Mark  Twain! 


22 


VI 

MORAL  INDIGNATION 

The  loud,  preposterous  moral  crusades 
that  so  endlessly  rock  the  republic— 
against  the  rum  demon,  against  Sunday 
baseball,  against  moving-pictures,  against 
dancing,  against  fornication,  against  the 
cigarette,  against  all  things  sinful  and 
charming — these  astounding  Methodist 
jehads  offer  fat  clinical  material  to  the 
student  of  mobocracy.  In  the  long  run, 
nearly  all  of  them  must  succeed,  for  the 
mob  is  eternally  virtuous,  and  the  only 
thing  necessary  to  get  it  in  favor  of  some 
new  and  super-oppressive  law  is  to  con 
vince  it  that  that  law  will  be  distasteful  to 
the  minority  which  it  envies  and  hates. 
The  poor  numskull  who  is  so  horribly 
harrowed  by  Puritan  pulpit-thumpers 
that  he  can't  go  to  a  ball  game  on  Sunday 
afternoon  without  dreaming  of  hell  and 
the  devil  all  Sunday  night  is  naturally  en 
vious  of  the  fellow  who  can,  and  being 
envious  of  him,  he  hates  him  and  is  eager 

23 


to  destroy  his  offensive  happiness.  The 
farmer  who  works  18  hours  a  day  and 
never  gets  a  day  off  is  envious  of  his  farm 
hand  who  goes  to  the  crossroads  and  bar 
rels  up  on  Saturday  afternoon;  hence  the 
virulence  of  prohibition  among  the  peas 
antry.  The  hard-working  householder 
who,  on  some  bitter  evening,  glances  over 
the  Saturday  Evening  Post  for  a  square 
and  honest  look  at  his  wife  is  envious  of 
those  gaudy  drummers  who  go  gallivant 
ing  about  the  country  with  scarlet  girls; 
hence  the  Mann  Act.  If  these  deviltries 
were  equally  open  to  all  men,  and  all  men 
were  equally  capable  of  practising  and 
appreciating  them,  their  unpopularity 
would  tend  to  wither. 

I  often  think,  indeed,  that  the  prohibi 
tionist  tub-thumpers  make  a  tactical  mis 
take  in  dwelling  too  much  upon  the  evils 
and  horrors  of  alcohol,  and  not  enough 
upon  its  delights.  A  few  enlarged  photo 
graphs  of  first-class  bar-rooms,  showing 
the  rows  of  well-fed,  well-dressed  bibuli 
happily  moored  to  the  brass  rails,  their 

24 


noses  in  fragrant  mint  and  hops  and  their 
hands  reaching  out  for  free  rations  of 
olives,  pretzels,  cloves,  pumpernickle,  Bis 
marck  herring,  anchovies,  wieners,  Smith- 
field  ham  and  dill  pickles — such  a  gallery 
of  contentment  would  probably  do  far 
more  execution  among  the  dismal  shudra 
than  all  the  current  portraits  of  drunkards' 
livers.  To  vote  for  prohibition  in  the 
face  of  the  liver  portraits  means  to  vote 
for  the  good  of  the  other  fellow,  for  even 
the  oldest  bibulomaniac  always  thinks  that 
he  himself  will  escape.  This  is  an  act  of 
altruism  almost  impossible  to  the  mob- 
man,  whose  selfishness  is  but  little  cor 
rupted  by  the  imagination  that  shows  itself 
in  his  betters.  His  most  austere  renuncia 
tions  represent  no  more  than  a  matching 
of  the  joys  of  indulgence  against  the  pains 
of  hell ;  religion,  to  him,  is  little  more  than 
synthesized  fear  ....  I  venture  that 
many  a  vote  for  prohibition  comes  from 
gentlemen  who  look  longingly  through 
swinging  doors — and  pass  on  in  propitia- 

25 


tion  of  Satan  and  their  alert  consorts,  the 
lake  of  brimstone  and  the  corrective 
broomstick. 


26 


VII. 

STABLE-NAMES 

Why  doesn't  some  patient  drudge  of  a 
Privat  Dozent  compile  a  dictionary  of  the 
stable-names  of  the  great?  All  show  dogs 
and  race  horses,  as  everyone  knows,  have 
stable-names.  On  the  list  of  entries  a  fast 
mare  may  appear  as  Czarina  Olga  Fedor- 
ovna,  but  in  the  stable  she  is  not  that  at 
all,  nor  even  Czarina  or  Olga,  but  maybe 
Lil  or  Jennie.  And  a  prize  bulldog, 
Champion  Zoroaster  or  Charlemagne  XI. 
on  the  bench  may  be  plain  Jack  or  Ponto 
en  famille.  So  with  celebrities  of  the 
genus  homo.  Huxley's  official  style  and 
appellation  was  "The  Right  Hon.  Thomas 
Henry  Huxley,  P.  C.,  M.  D.,  Ph.  D., 
LL.  D.,  D.  C.  L.,  D.  Sc.,  F.  R.  S.,"  and 

his  biographer  tells  us  that  he  delighted 
in  its  rolling  grandeur — but  to  his  wife 
he  was  always  Hal.  Shakespeare,  to  his 
fellows  of  his  Bankside,  was  Will,  and 
perhaps  Willie  to  Ann  Hathaway.  The 
Kaiser  is  another  Willie:  the  late  Czar 

27 


so  addressed  him  in  their  famous  exchange 
of  telegrams.  The  Czar  himself  was 
Nicky  in  those  days,  and  no  doubt  remains 
Nicky  to  his  cronies  today.  Edgar  Allan 
Poe  was  always  Eddie  to  his  wife,  and 
Mark  Twain  was  always  Youth  to  his. 
P.  T.  Barnum's  stable-name  was  Taylor, 
his  middle  name;  Charles  Lamb's  was 
Guy;  Nietzsche's  was  Fritz;  Whistler's 
was  Jimmie;  the  late  King  Edward's  was 
Bertie;  Grover  Cleveland's  was  Steve;  J. 
Pierpont  Morgan's  was  Jack;  Dr.  Wil 
son's  is  Tom. 

Some  given  names  are  surrounded  by 
a  whole  flotilla  of  stable-names.  Henry, 
for  example,  is  softened  variously  into 
Harry,  Hen,  Hank,  Hal,  Henny,  Enery, 
O'nry  and  Heine.  Which  did  Ann 
Boleyn  use  when  she  cooed  into  the  sus 
picious  ear  of  Henry  VIII.?  To  which 
did  Henrik  Ibsen  answer  at  the  domestic 
hearth?  It  is  difficult  to  imagine  his  wife 
calling  him  Henrik:  the  name  is  harsh, 
clumsy,  razor-edged.  But  did  she  make 
it  Hen  or  Rik,  or  neither?  What  was 

28 


Bismarck  to  the  Fiirstin,  and  to  the  mother 
he  so  vastly  feared?  Ottchen?  Some 
how  it  seems  impossible.  What  was 
Grant  to  his  wife?  Surely  not  Ulysses! 
And  Wolfgang  Amadeus  Mozart?  And 
Rutherford  B.  Hayes?  Was  Robert 
Browning  ever  Bob?  Was  John  Wesley 
ever  Jack?  Was  Emanuel  Swendeborg 
ever  Manny?  Was  Tadeusz  Kosciusko 
ever  Teddy? 

A  fair  field  of  inquiry  invites.  Let  some 
laborious  assistant  professor  explore  and 
chart  it.  There  will  be  more  sweet  fancy 
in  his  report  than  in  all  the  novels  ever 
written. 


29 


VIII 

THE  JEWS 

The  Jews,  like  the  Americans,  labor 
under  a  philosophical  dualism,  and  in 
both  cases  it  is  a  theological  heritage.  On 
the  one  hand  there  is  the  idealism  that  is 
lovely  and  uplifting  and  will  get  a  man 
into  heaven,  and  on  the  other  hand  there 
is  the  realism  that  works.  The  fact  that 
the  Jews  cling  to  both,  thus  running,  as  it 
were,  upon  two  tracks,  is  what  makes 
them  so  puzzling,  now  and  then,  to  the 
goyim.  In  one  aspect  they  stand 
for  the  most  savage  practicality;  in 
another  aspect  they  are  dreamers  of 
an  almost  fabulous  other-worldliness. 
My  own  belief  is  that  the  essential  Jew  is 
the  idealist — this  his  occasional  flashing  of 
hyena  teeth  is  no  more  than  a  necessary 
concession  to  the  harsh  demands  of  the 
struggle  for  existence.  Perhaps,  in  many 
cases,  it  is  due  to  an  actual  corruption  of 
blood.  The  Jews  come  from  the  Levant, 
and  their  women  were  exposed  for  many 

30 


centuries  to  the  admiration  of  Greek, 
Arab  and  Armenian.  The  shark  that  a 
Jew  can  be  at  his  worst  is  simply  a  Greek 
or  Armenian  at  his  best. 

As  a  statement  of  post-mortem  and 
super-terrestial  fact,  the  religion  that  the 
Jews  have  foisted  upon  the  world  seems 
to  me  to  be  as  vast  a  curse  as  the  influenza 
that  we  inherit  from  the  Tartars  or  the 
political  fallacies  set  afloat  by  the  French 
Revolution.  The  one  thing  that  can  be 
said  in  favor  of  it  is  that  it  is  not  true,  and 
yet  we  suffer  from  it  almost  as  much  as  if 
it  were  true.  But  with  it,  encasing  it  and 
preserving  it,  there  has  come  something 
that  is  positively  valuable  —  something, 
indeed,  that  is  beyond  all  price — and  that 
is  Jewish  poetry.  To  compare  it  to  the 
poetry  of  any  other  race  is  wholly  impos 
sible;  it  stands  completely  above  all  the 
rest;  it  is  as  far  beyond  the  next  best  as 
German  music  is  beyond  French  music,  or 
French  painting  beyond  English  painting, 
or  the  English  drama  beyond  the  Italian 
drama.  There  are  single  chapters  in  the 

31 


Old  Testament  that  are  worth  all  the 
poetry  ever  written  in  the  New  World  and 
nine-tenths  of  that  written  in  the  Old. 
The  Jews  of  those  ancient  days  had 
imagination,  they  had  dignity,  they  had 
ears  for  sweet  sound,  they  had,  above  all, 
the  faculty  of  grandeur.  The  stupendous 
music  that  issued  from  them  has  swept 
their  barbaric  demonology  along  with  it, 
setting  at  naught  the  collective  intelli 
gence  of  the  human  species;  they  em 
balmed  their  idiotic  taboos  and  fetishes  in 
undying  strains,  and  so  gave  them  some 
measure  of  the  same  immortality.  A  race 
of  lawgivers?  Bosh!  Leviticus  is  as 
archaic  as  the  Code  of  Manu,  and  the 
Decalogue  belongs  to  ethical  paleontol 
ogy.  A  race  of  seers?  Bosh  again!  The 
God  they  saw  survives  only  as  a  bogey 
man,  a  theory,  a  gaseous  vertebrate,  an 
uneasy  and  vexatious  ghost.  A  race  of 
traders  and  sharpers?  Bosh  a  third  time! 
The  Jews  are  as  poor  as  the  Spaniards. 
But  a  race  of  poets,  my  lords,  a  race  of 
poets!  It  is  a  vision  of  beauty  that  has 

32 


ever  haunted  them.  And  it  has  been  their 
destiny  to  transmit  that  vision,  enfeebled, 
perhaps,  but  still  distinct,  to  other  and 
lesser  peoples,  that  life  might  be  made 
softer  for  the  sons  of  men,  and  the  good 
ness  of  the  Lord  God — whoever  He  may 
be — might  not  be  forgotten. 


33 

I 


IX 

THE  COMSTOCKIAN  PREMISS 

It  is  argued  against  certain  books,  by  vir 
tuosi  of  moral  alarm,  that  they  depict  vice 
as  attractive.  This  recalls  the  king  who 
hanged  a  judge  for  deciding  that  an  arch 
bishop  was  a  mammal. 


34 


X 

THE  LABIAL  INFAMY 

After  five  years  of  search  I  have  been 
able  to  discover  but  one  book  in  English 
upon  the  art  of  kissing,  and  that  is  a  very 
feeble  treatise  by  a  savant  of  York,  Pa., 
Dr.  R.  McCormick  Sturgeon.  There  may 
be  others,  but  I  have  been  quite  unable 
to  find  them.  Kissing,  for  all  one  hears 
of  it,  has  not  attracted  the  scientists  and 
literati;  one  compares  its  meagre  litera 
ture  with  the  endless  books  upon  the  other 
phenomena  of  love,  especially  divorce  and 
obstetrics.  Even  Dr.  Sturgeon,  pioneering 
bravely,  is  unable  to  get  beyond  a  senti 
mental  and  trivial  view  of  the  thing  he 
vivisects,  and  so  his  book  is  no  more  than 
a  compendium  of  mush.  His  very  de 
scription  of  the  act  of  kissing  is  made  up 
of  sonorous  gabble  about  heaving  bosoms, 
red  lips,  electric  sparks  and  such-like 
imaginings.  What  reason  have  we  for  be 
lieving,  as  he  says,  that  the  lungs  are 
"strongly  expanded"  during  the  act?  My 

35 


own  casual  observation  inclines  me  to 
hold  that  the  opposite  is  true,  that  the 
lungs  are  actually  collapsed  in  a  pseudo- 
asthmatic  spasm.  Again,  what  is  the 
ground  for  arguing  that  the  lips  are  "full, 
ripe  and  red?"  The  real  effect  of  the 
emotions  that  accompany  kissing  is  to 
empty  the  superficial  capillaries  and  so 
produce  a  leaden  pallor.  As  for  such  sali 
ent  symptoms  as  the  temperature,  the 
pulse  and  the  rate  of  respiration,  the 
learned  pundit  passes  them  over  without  a 
word.  Mrs.  Elsie  Clews  Parsons  would 
be  a  good  one  to  write  a  sober  and  accu 
rate  treatise  upon  kissing.  Her  books 
upon  "The  Family"  and  "Fear  and  Con 
ventionality"  indicate  her  possession  of 
the  right  sort  of  learning.  Even  better 
would  be  a  work  by  Havelock  Ellis,  say, 
in  three  or  four  volumes.  Ellis  has  de 
voted  his  whole  life  to  illuminating  the 
mysteries  of  sex,  and  his  collection  of  ma 
terials  is  unsurpassed  in  the  world. 
Surely  there  must  be  an  enormous  mass 
of  instructive  stuff  about  kissing  in  his 

36 


card  indexes,  letter  files,  book  presses  and 
archives. 

Just  why  the  kiss  as  we  know  it  should 
have  attained  to  its  present  popularity  in 
Christendom  is  probably  one  of  the  things 
past  finding  out.  The  Japanese,  a  very 
affectionate  and  sentimental  people,  do 
not  practise  kissing  in  any  form;  they 
regard  the  act,  in  fact,  with  an  aver 
sion  matching  our  own  aversion  to  the 
family  tooth-brush.  Nor  is  it  in  vogue 
among  the  Moslems,  nor  among  the 
Chinese,  who  countenance  it  only  as 
between  mother  and  child.  Even  in  parts 
of  Christendom  it  is  girt  about  by  rigid 
taboos,  so  that  its  practise  tends  to  be  re 
stricted  to  a  few  occasions.  Two  French 
men  or  Italians,  when  they  meet,  kiss  each 
other  on  both  cheeks.  One  used  to  see, 
indeed,  many  pictures  of  General  Joffre 
thus  bussing  the  heroes  of  Verdun;  there 
even  appeared  in  print  a  story  to  the  effect 
that  one  of  them  objected  to  the  scratch 
ing  of  his  moustache.  But  imagine  two 
Englishmen  kissing!  Or  two  Germans! 

37 


As  well  imagine  the  former  kissing  the 
latter!  Such  a  display  of  affection  is  sim 
ply  impossible  to  men  of  Northern  blood ; 
they  would  die  with  shame  if  caught  at  it. 
The  Englishman,  like  the  American, 
never  kisses  if  he  can  help  it.  He  even 
regards  it  as  bad  form  to  kiss  his  own 
wife.  The  Latin  has  no  such  compunc 
tions.  He  leaps  to  the  business  regardless 
of  place  or  time;  his  sole  concern  is  with 
the  lady.  Once,  in  driving  from  Nice  to 
Monte  Carlo  along  the  lower  Corniche 
road,  I  passed  a  hundred  or  so  open  taxi- 
cabs  containing  man  and  woman,  and 
fully  75  per  cent,  of  the  men  had  their 
arms  around  their  companions,  and  were 
kissing  them.  These  were  not  peasants, 
remember,  but  well-to-do  persons.  In 
England  such  a  scene  would  have  caused 
a  great  scandal;  in  most  American  States 
the  police  would  have  charged  the  offend 
ers  with  drawn  revolvers. 

The  charm  of  kissing  is  one  of  the 
things  I  have  always  wondered  at.  I  do 
not  pretend,  of  course,  that  I  have  never 

38 


done  it;  mere  politeness  forces  one  to  it; 
there  are  women  who  sulk  and  grow  bel 
licose  unless  one  at  least  makes  the  motions 
of  kissing  them.  But  what  I  mean  is 
that  I  have  never  found  the  act  a  tenth 
part  as  agreeable  as  poets,  the  authors  of 
musical  comedy  librettos,  and  (on  the 
contrary  side)  chaperones  and  the  gendar 
merie  make  it  out.  The  physical  sensa 
tion,  far  from  being  pleasant,  is  intensely 
uncomfortable — the  suspension  of  respir 
ation,  indeed,  quickly  resolves  itself  into  a 
feeling  of  suffocation — and  the  posture 
necessitated  by  the  approximation  of  lips 
and  lips  is  unfailingly  a  constrained  and 
ungraceful  one.  Theoretically,  a  man 
kisses  a  woman  perpendicularly,  with 
their  eyes,  those  "windows  of  the  soul," 
synchronizing  exactly.  But  actually,  on 
account  of  the  incompressibility  of  the 
nasal  cartilages,  he  has  to  incline  either 
his  or  her  head  to  an  angle  of  at  least  60 
degrees,  and  the  result  is  that  his  right 
eye  gazes  insanely  at  the  space  between  her 
eyebrows,  while  his  left  eye  is  fixed  upon 

39 


some  vague  spot  behind  her.  An  instan 
taneous  photograph  of  such  a  maneuvre, 
taken  at  the  moment  of  incidence,  would 
probably  turn  the  stomach  of  even  the 
most  romantic  man,  and  force  him,  in 
sheer  self-respect,  to  renounce  kissing  as 
he  has  renounced  leap-frog  and  walking 
on  stilts. 

But  the  most  embarrassing  moment,  in 
kissing,  does  not  come  during  the  actual 
kiss  (for  at  that  time  the  sensation  of  suf 
focation  drives  out  all  purely  psychical 
feelings),  but  immediately  afterward. 
What  is  one  to  say  to  the  woman  then? 
The  occasion  obviously  demands  some 
sort  of  remark.  One  has  just  received  (in 
theory)  a  great  boon ;  the  silence  begins  to 
make  itself  felt;  there  stands  the  fair  one, 
obviously  waiting.  Is  one  to  thank  her? 
Certainly  that  would  be  too  transparent  a 
piece  of  hypocrisy,  too  flaccid  a  banality. 
Is  one  to  tell  her  that  one  loves  her?  Ob 
viously,  there  is  danger  in  such  assurances, 
and  beside,  one  usually  doesn't,  and  a  lie 
is  a  lie.  Or  is  one  to  descend  to  chatty 

40 


commonplaces — about  the  weather,  litera 
ture,  politics,  the  war?  The  practical  im 
possibility  of  solving  the  problem  leads 
almost  inevitably  to  a  blunder  far  worse 
than  any  merely  verbal  one:  one  kisses 
her  again,  and  then  again,  and  so  on,  and 
so  on.  The  ultimate  result  is  satiety,  re 
pugnance,  disgust;  even  the  girl  gets 
enough. 


41 


XI 

A  TRUE  ASCETIC 

'Herbert  Spencer's  objection  to  swear 
ing,  of  which  so  much  has  been  made  by 
moralists,  was  not  an  objection  to  its  sin- 
fulness  but  an  objection  to  its  charm.  In 
brief,  he  feared  comfort,  satisfaction,  joy. 
The  boarding  houses  in  which  he  dragged 
out  his  gray  years  were  as  bare  and  cheer 
less  as  so  many  piano  boxes.  He  avoided 
all  the  little  vices  and  dissipations  which 
make  human  existence  bearable :  good 
eating,  good  drinking,  dancing,  tobacco, 
poker,  poetry,  the  theatre,  personal  adorn 
ment,  philandering.  He  was  insanely  sus 
picious  of  everything  that  threatened  to 
interfere  with  his  work.  Even  when  that 
work  halted  him  by  the  sheer  agony  of 
its  monotony,  and  it  became  necessary  for 
him  to  find  recreation,  he  sought  out  some 
recreation  that  was  as  unattractive  as  pos 
sible,  in  the  hope  that  it  would  quickly 
drive  him  back  to  work  again.  Having 
to  choose  between  methods  of  locomotion 

42 


on  his  holidays,  he  chose  going  afoot,  the 
most  laborious  and  least  satisfying  avail 
able.  Brought  to  bay  by  his  human  need 
for  a  woman,  he  directed  his  fancy  toward 
George  Eliot,  probably  the  most  unappe 
tizing  woman  of  his  race  and  time.  Drawn 
irresistibly  to  music,  he  avoided  the  Fifth 
Symphony  and  "Tristan  und  Isolde,"  and 
joined  a  crowd  of  old  maids  singing  part 
songs  around  a  cottage  piano.  John  Tyn- 
dall  saw  clearly  the  effect  of  all  this  and 
protested  against  it,  saying,  "He'd  be  a 
much  nicer  fellow  if  he  had  a  good  swear 
now  and  then" — i.  e.,  if  he  let  go  now  and 
then,  if  he  yielded  to  his  healthy  human  in 
stincts  now  and  then,  if  he  went  on  some 
sort  of  debauch  now  and  then.  But  what 
Tyndall  overlooked  was  the  fact  that  the 
meagreness  of  his  recreations  was  the  very 
element  that  attracted  Spencer  to  them. 
Obsessed  by  the  fear — and  it  turned  out 
to  be  well-grounded — that  he  would  not 
live  long  enough  to  complete  his  work,  he 
regarded  all  joy  as  a  temptation,  a  corrup 
tion,  a  sin  of  scarlet.  He  was  a  true  ascetic, 

43 


He  could  sacrifice  all  things  of  the  present 
for  one  thing  of  the  future,  all  things  real 
for  one  thing  ideal. 


44 


XII 
ON  LYING 

Lying  stands  on  a  different  plane  from 
all  other  moral  offenses,  not  because  it  is 
intrinsically  more  heinous  or  less  heinous, 
but  simply  because  it  is  the  only  one  that 
may  be  accurately  measured.  Forgetting 
unwitting  error,  which  has  nothing  to  do 
with  morals,  a  statement  is  either  true  or 
not  true.  This  is  a  simple  distinction  and 
relatively  easy  to  establish.  But  when  one 
comes  to  other  derelictions  the  thing 
grows  more  complicated.  The  line  be 
tween  stealing  and  not  stealing  is  beauti 
fully  vague;  whether  or  not  one  has 
crossed  it  is  not  determined  by  the  ob 
jective  act,  but  by  such  delicate  things  as 
motive  and  purpose.  So  again,  with 
assault,  sex  offenses,  and  even  murder; 
there  may  be  surrounding  circumstances 
which  greatly  condition  the  moral  quality 
of  the  actual  act.  But  lying  is  specific, 
exact,  scientific.  Its  capacity  for  precise 
determination,  indeed,  makes  its  presence 

45 


or  non-presence  the  only  accurate  gauge 
of  other  immoral  acts.  Murder,  for  ex 
ample,  is  nowhere  regarded  as  immoral, 
save  it  involve  some  repudiation  of  a 
social  compact,  of  a  tacit  promise  to  re 
frain  from  it — in  brief,  some  deceit,  some 
perfidy,  some  lie.  One  may  kill  freely 
when  the  pact  is  formally  broken,  as  in 
war.  One  may  kill  equally  freely  when  it 
is  broken  by  the  victim,  as  in  an  assault  by 
a  highwayman.  But  one  may  not  kill  so 
long  as  it  is  not  broken,  and  one  may  not 
break  it  to  clear  the  way.  Some  form  of 
lie  is  at  the  bottom  of  all  other  recog 
nized  crimes,  from  seduction  to  embezzle 
ment.  Curiously  enough,  this  master  im 
morality  of  them  all  is  not  prohibited  by 
the  Ten  Commandments,  nor  is  it  penal 
ized,  in  its  pure  form,  by  the  code  of  any 
civilized  nation.  Only  savages  have  laws 
against  lying  per  se. 


46 


XIII 

HISTORY 

It  is  the  misfortune  of  humanity  that  its 
history  is  chiefly  written  by  third-rate 
men.  The  first-rate  man  seldom  has  any 
impulse  to  record  and  philosophise;  his 
impulse  in  to  act;  life,  to  him,  is  an  adven 
ture,  not  a  syllogism  or  an  autopsy.  Thus 
the  writing  of  history  is  left  to  professors, 
moralists,  theorists,  dunderheads.  Few 
historians,  great  or  small,  have  shown  any 
capacity  for  the  affairs  they  presume  to 
describe  and  interpret.  Gibbon  was  an 
inglorious  failure  as  a  member  of  Parlia 
ment.  Thycydides  made  such  a  mess  of 
his  military  (or,  rather,  naval)  command 
that  he  was  exiled  from  Athens  for  twenty 
years  and  finally  assassinated.  Flavius 
Josephus,  serving  as  governor  of  Galilee, 
lost  the  whole  province  to  the  Romans, 
and  had  to  flee  for  his  life.  Momseen, 
elected  to  the  Prussian  Landtag,  flirted 
with  the  Socialists.  How  much  better  we 
would  understand  the  habits  and  nature  of 

47 


man  if  there  were  more  historians  like 
Julius  Caesar,  or  even  like  Niccolo 
Machiavelli!  Remembering  the  sharp 
and  devastating  character  of  their  rough 
notes,  think  what  marvelous  histories  Bis 
marck,  Washington  and  Frederick  the 
Great  might  have  written !  Such  men  are 
privy  to  the  facts;  the  usual  historians 
have  to  depend  on  deductions,  rumors, 
guesses.  Again,  such  men  know  how  to 
tell  the  truth,  however  unpleasant;  they 
are  wholly  free  of  that  puerile  moral  ob 
session  which  marks  the  pedagogue.  .  .  . 
But  they  so  seldom  tell  it!  Well,  perhaps 
some  of  them  have — and  their  penalty  is 
that  they  are  damned  and  forgotten. 


48 


XIV 

THE  CURSE  OF  CIVILIZATION 

A  civilized  man's  worst  curse  is  social 
obligation.  The  most  unpleasant  act 
imaginable  is  to  go  to  a  dinner  party.  One 
could  get  far  better  food,  taking  one  day 
with  another,  at  Childs',  or  even  in  a  Penn 
sylvania  Railroad  dining-car;  one  could 
find  far  more  amusing  society  in  a  bar 
room  or  a  bordello,  or  even  at  the  Y.  M. 
C.  A.  No  hostess  in  Christendom  ever 
arranged  a  dinner  party  of  any  preten 
sions  without  including  at  least  one  in 
tensely  disagreeable  person — a  vain  and 
vapid  girl,  a  hideous  woman,  a  follower 
of  baseball,  a  social  pusher,  a  stock 
broker,  a  veteran  of  some  war  or  other,  a 
gabbler  of  politics.  And  one  is  enough  to 
do  the  business. 


49 


XV 
EUGENICS 

The  error  of  the  eugenists  lies  in  the 
assumption  that  a  physically  healthy  man 
is  the  best  fitted  to  survive.  This  is  true  of 
rats  and  the  pediculae,  but  not  of  the 
higher  animals,  e.  g.,  horses,  dogs  and 
men.  In  these  higher  animals  one  looks 
for  more  subtle  qualities,  chiefly  of  the 
spirit.  Imagine  estimating  philosophers 
by  their  chest  expansions,  their  blood 
pressures,  their  Wasserman  reactions! 

The  so-called  social  diseases,  over 
which  eugenists  raise  such  a  pother,  are 
surely  not  the  worst  curses  that  mankind 
has  to  bear.  Some  of  the  greatest  men  in 
history  have  had  them ;  whole  nations  have 
had  them  and  survived.  The  truth  about 
them  is  that,  save  in  relatively  rare  cases, 
they  do  very  little  damage.  The  horror 
in  which  they  are  held  is  chiefly  a  moral 
horror,  and  its  roots  lie  in  the  assumption 
that  they  cannot  be  contracted  without  sin. 
Nothing  could  be  more  false.  Many  great 

50 


moralists  have  suffered  from  them:  the 
gods  are  always  up  to  sardonic  waggeries. 
Moreover,  only  one  of  them  is  actually 
inheritable,  and  that  one  is  transmitted 
relatively  seldom.  But  among  psychic 
characters  one  finds  that  practically  all 
are  inheritable.  For  example,  stupidity, 
credulity,  avarice,  pecksniffery,  lack  of 
imagination,  hatred  of  beauty,  meanness, 
poltroonery,  petty  brutality,  smallness  of 
soul.  ...  I  here  present,  of  course,  the 
Puritan  complex;  there  flashes  up  the 
image  of  the  "good  man,"  that  libel  on 
God  and  the  devil.  Consider  him  well. 
If  you  had  to  choose  a  sire  for  a  first-rate 
son,  would  you  choose  a  consumptive  Jew 
with  the  fires  of  eternity  in  his  eyes,  or 
an  Iowa  right-thinker  with  his  hold  full 
of  Bibles  and  breakfast  food? 


51 


XVI 

THE  JOCOSE  GODS 

What  humor  could  be  wilder  than  that 
of  life  itself?  Franz  Schubert,  on  his 
deathbed,  read  the  complete  works  of 
J.  Fenimore  Cooper.  John  Millington 
Synge  wrote  "Riders  to  the  Sea"  on  a 
second-hand  $40  typewriter,  and  wore  a 
celluloid  collar.  Richard  Wagner  made 
a  living,  during  four  lean  years,  arrang 
ing  Italian  opera  arias  for  the  cornet. 
William  Shakespeare  was  a  social  pusher 
and  bought  him  a  bogus  coat-of-arms. 
Johannes  Brahms  had  a  high,  piping  voice 
and  wore  pantaloons  that  stopped  at  his 
fetlocks.  Martin  Luther  suffered  from 
the  jim-jams.  One  of  the  greatest  soldiers 
in  Hungarian  history  was  named  Hunjadi 
Janos.  .  .  . 


52 


XVII 
WAR 

Superficially,  war  seems  inordinately 
cruel  and  wasteful,  and  yet  it  must  be 
plain  on  reflection  that  the  natural  evolu 
tionary  process  is  quite  as  cruel  and  even 
more  wasteful.  Man's  chief  efforts  in 
times  of  peace  are  devoted  to  making  that 
process  less  violent  and  sanguinary.  Civ 
ilization,  indeed,  may  be  defined  as  a  con 
structive  criticism  of  nature,  and  Hux 
ley  even  called  it  a  conspiracy  against  na 
ture.  Man  tries  to  remedy  what  must 
inevitably  seem  the  mistakes  and  to  check 
what  must  inevitably  seem  the  wanton 
cruelty  of  the  Creator.  In  war  he  aban 
dons  these  efforts,  and  so  becomes  more 
jovian.  The  Greeks  never  represented  the 
inhabitants  of  Olympus  as  succoring  and 
protecting  one  another,  but  always  as 
fighting  and  attempting  to  destroy  one 
another. 

No  form  of  death  inflicted  by  war  is 
one-half  so  cruel  as  certain  forms  of  death 

53 


that  are  seen  in  hospitals  every  day.  Be 
sides,  these  forms  of  death  have  the  fur 
ther  disadvantage  of  being  inglorious. 
The  average  man,  dying  in  bed,  not  only 
has  to  stand  the  pains  and  terrors  of  death ; 
he  must  also,  if  he  can  bring  himself  to 
think  of  it  at  all,  stand  the  notion  that  he 
is  ridiculous.  .  .  .  The  soldier  is  at  least 
not  laughed  at.  Even  his  enemies  treat  his 
agonies  with  respect. 


54 


XVIII 

MORALIST  AND  ARTIST 

I  dredge  up  the  following  from  an  essay 
on  George  Bernard  Shaw  by  Robert 
Blatchford,  the  English  Socialist:  "Shaw 
is  something  much  better  than  a  wit,  much 
better  than  an  artist,  much  better  than  a 
politician  or  a  dramatist;  he  is  a  moral 
ist,  a  teacher  of  ethics,  austere,  relentless, 
fiercely  earnest." 

What  could  be  more  idiotic?  Then 
Cotton  Mather  was  a  greater  man  than 
Johann  Sebastian  Bach.  Then  the  aver 
age  college  critic  of  the  arts,  with  his 
balderdash  about  inspiration  and  moral 
purpose,  is  greater  than  George  Brandes 
or  Saint-Beuve.  Then  Eugene  Brieux, 
with  his  Y.  M.  C.  A.  platitudinizing,  is 
greater  than  Moliere,  with  his  ethical 
agnosticism,  his  ironical  determinism. 

This  childish  respect  for  moralizing 
runs  through  the  whole  of  contemporary 
criticism — at  least  in  England  and  Amer 
ica.  Blatchford  differs  from  the  profes- 

55 


serial  critics  only  in  the  detail  that  he 
can  actually  write.  What  he  says  about 
Shaw  has  been  said,  in  heavy  and  suffo 
cating  words,  by  almost  all  of  them.  And 
yet  nothing  could  be  less  true.  The  mor 
alist,  at  his  best,  can  never  be  anything 
save  a  sort  of  journalist.  Moral  values 
change  too  often  to  have  any  serious  valid 
ity  or  interest;  what  is  a  virtue  today  is  a 
sin  tomorrow.  But  the  man  who  creates 
a  thing  of  beauty  creates  something  that 
lasts. 


56 


XIX 

ACTORS 

"In  France  they  call  an  actor  a  m'as- 
tu-vu,  which,  anglicised,  means  a  have- 
you  seen  me?  .  .  .  The  average  actor 
holds  the  mirror  up  to  nature  and  sees  in 
it  only  the  reflection  of  himself."  I  take 
the  words  from  a  late  book  on  the  so- 
called  art  of  the  mime  by  the  editor  of  a 
magazine  devoted  to  the  stage.  The 
learned  author  evades  plumbing  the  psy 
chological  springs  of  this  astounding  and 
almost  invariable  vanity,  this  endless 
bumptiousness  of  the  cabotin  in  all  climes 
and  all  ages.  His  one  attempt  is  banal: 
"a  foolish  public  makes  much  of  him." 
With  all  due  respect,  Nonsense!  The 
larval  actor  is  full  of  hot  and  rancid  gases 
long  before  a  foolish  public  has  had  a 
fair  chance  to  make  anything  of  him  at 
all,  and  he  continues  to  emit  them  long 
after  it  has  tried  him,  condemned  him  and 
bidden  him  be  damned.  There  is,  indeed, 
little  choice  in  the  virulence  of  their  self- 

57 


respect  between  a  Broadway  star  who  is 
slobbered  over  by  press  agents  and  fat 
women,  and  the  poor  ham  who  plays 
thinking  parts  in  a  No.  7  road  company. 
The  two  are  alike  charged  to  the  limit; 
one  more  ohm,  or  molecule,  and  they 
would  burst.  Actors  begin  where  militia 
colonels,  Fifth  avenue  rectors  and  Chau- 
tauqua  orators  leave  off.  The  most  mod 
est  of  them  (barring,  perhaps,  a  few  un 
earthly  traitors  to  the  craft)  matches  the 
conceit  of  the  solitary  pretty  girl  on  a 
slow  ship.  In  their  lofty  eminence  of 
pomposity  they  are  challenged  only  by 
Anglican  bishops  and  grand  opera  tenors. 
I  have  spoken  of  the  danger  they  run  of 
bursting.  In  the  case  of  tenors  it  must 
sometimes  actually  happen ;  even  the  least 
of  them  swells  visibly  as  he  sings,  and 
permanently  as  he  grows  older.  .  .  . 

But  why  are  actors,  in  general,  such 
blatant  and  obnoxious  asses,  such  arrant 
posturers  and  wind-bags?  Why  is  it  as 
surprising  to  find  an  unassuming  and  lik 
able  fellow  among  them  as  to  find  a  Greek 

58 


without  fleas?  The  answer  is  quite  sim 
ple.  To  reach  it  one  needs  but  consider 
the  type  of  young  man  who  normally  gets 
stage-struck.  Is  he,  taking  averages,  the 
intelligent,  alert,  ingenious,  ambitious 
young  fellow?  Is  he  the  young  fellow 
with  ideas  in  him,  and  a  yearning  for  hard 
and  difficult  work?  Is  he  the  diligent 
reader,  the  hard  student,  the  eager  in 
quirer?  No.  He  is,  in  the  overwhelming 
main,  the  neighborhood  fop  and  beau,  the 
human  clothes-horse,  the  nimble  squire  of 
dames.  The  youths  of  more  active  mind, 
emerging  from  adolescence,  turn  to  busi 
ness  and  the  professions;  the  men  that 
they  admire  and  seek  to  follow  are  men 
of  genuine  distinction,  men  who  have  ac 
tually  done  difficult  and  valuable  things, 
men  who  have  fought  good  (if  often  dis 
honest)  fights  and  are  respected  and  en 
vied  by  other  men.  The  stage-struck 
youth  is  of  a  softer  and  more  shallow  sort. 
He  seeks,  not  a  chance  to  test  his  mettle 
by  hard  and  useful  work,  but  an  easy 
chance  to  shine.  He  craves  the  regard, 

59 


not  of  men,  but  of  women.  He  is,  in 
brief,  a  hollow  and  incompetent  creature, 
a  strutter  and  poseur,  a  popinjay,  a  pretty 
one.  .  .  . 

I  thus  beg  the  question,  but  explain  the 
actor.  He  is  this  silly  youngster  grown 
older,  but  otherwise  unchanged.  An  ini 
tiate  of  a  profession  requiring  little  more 
information,  culture  or  capacity  for  ratio 
cination  than  that  of  the  lady  of  joy,  and 
surrounded  in  his  workshop  by  men  who 
are  as  stupid,  as  vain  and  as  empty  as  he 
himself  will  be  in  the  years  to  come,  he 
suffers  an  arrest  of  development,  and  the 
little  intelligence  that  may  happen  to 
be  in  him  gets  no  chance  to  show  itself. 
The  result,  in  its  usual  manifestation,  is 
the  average  bad  actor — a  man  with  the 
cerebrum  of  a  floor-walker  and  the  vanity 
of  a  fashionable  chiropodist.  The  result, 
in  its  highest  and  holiest  form  is  the  actor- 
manager,  with  his  retinue  of  press-agents, 
parasites  and  worshipping  wenches — per 
haps  the  most  preposterous  and  awe- 
inspiring  donkey  that  civilization  has  yet 

60 


produced.  To  look  for  sense  in  a  fellow 
of  such  equipment  and  such  a  history 
would  be  like  looking  for  serviettes  in  a 
sailors'  boarding-house. 

By  the  same  token,  the  relatively 
greater  intelligence  of  actresses  is  ex 
plained.  They  are,  at  their  worst,  quite 
as  bad  as  the  generality  of  actors.  There 
are  she-stars  who  are  all  temperament  and 
balderdash — intellectually  speaking,  beg 
gars  on  horseback,  servant  girls  well 
washed.  But  no  one  who  knows  anything 
about  the  stage  need  be  told  that  it  can 
show  a  great  many  more  quick-minded 
and  self-respecting  women  than  intelli 
gent  men.  And  why?  Simply  because  its 
women  are  recruited,  in  the  main,  from 
a  class  much  above  that  which  furnishes 
its  men.  It  is  after  all,  not  unnatural  for 
a  woman  of  considerable  intelligence  to 
aspire  to  the  stage.  It  offers  her,  indeed, 
one  of  the  most  tempting  careers  that  is 
open  to  her.  She  cannot  hope  to  succeed 
in  business,  and  in  the  other  professions 
she  is  an  unwelcome  and  much-scoffed-at 

61 


intruder,  but  on  the  boards  she  can  meet 
men  on  an  equal  footing.  It  is  therefore, 
no  wonder  that  women  of  a  relatively 
superior  class  often  take  to  the  business. 
.  .  .  Once  they  embrace  it,  their  superior 
ity  to  their  male  colleagues  is  quickly 
manifest.  All  movements  against  pueril 
ity  and  imbecility  in  the  drama  have 
originated,  not  with  actors,  but  with 
actresses — that  is,  in  so  far  as  they  have 
originated  among  stage  folks  at  all.  The 
Ibsen  pioneers  were  such  women  as 
Helena  Modjeska,  Agnes  Sorma  and 
Janet  Achurch;  the  men  all  hung  back. 
Ibsen,  it  would  appear,  was  aware  of  this 
superior  alertness  and  took  shrewd  ad 
vantage  of  it.  At  all  events,  his  most  tempt 
ing  acting  parts  are  feminine  ones. 

The  girls  of  the  stage  demonstrate  this 
tendency  against  great  difficulties.  They 
have  to  carry  a  heavy  handicap  in  the 
enormous  number  of  women  who  seek  the 
footlights  merely  to  advertise  their  real 
profession,  but  despite  all  this,  anyone 
who  has  the  slightest  acquaintance  with 

62 


stagefolk  will  testify  that,  taking  one  with 
another,  the  women  have  vastly  more 
brains  than  the  men  and  are  appreciably 
less  vain  and  idiotic.  Relatively  few 
actresses  of  any  rank  marry  actors.  They 
find  close  communion  with  the  strutting 
brethren  psychologically  impossible. 
Stock-brokers,  dramatists  and  even  theat 
rical  managers  are  greatly  to  be  preferred. 


63 


XX 

THE  CROWD 

Gustave  Le  Bon  and  his  school,  in  their 
discussions  of  the  psychology  of  crowds, 
have  put  forward  the  doctrine  that  the 
individual  man,  cheek  by  jowl  with  the 
multitude,  drops  down  an  intellectual  peg 
or  two,  and  so  tends  to  show  the  mental 
and  emotional  reactions  of  his  inferiors. 
It  is  thus  that  they  explain  the  well-known 
violence  and  imbecility  of  crowds.  The 
crowd,  as  a  crowd,  performs  acts  that 
many  of  its  members,  as  individuals, 
would  never  be  guilty  of.  Its  average  in 
telligence  is  very  low;  it  is  inflammatory, 
vicious,  idiotic,  almost  simian.  Crowds, 
properly  worked  up  by  skilful  dema 
gogues,  are  ready  to  believe  anything,  and 
to  do  anything. 

Le  Bon,  I  daresay,  is  partly  right,  but 
also  partly  wrong.  His  theory  is  prob 
ably  too  flattering  to  the  average  num 
skull.  He  accounts  for  the  extravagance 
of  crowds  on  the  assumption  that  the 

64 


numskull,  along  with  the  superior  man, 
is  knocked  out  of  his  wits  by  suggestion — 
that  he,  too,  does  things  in  association  that 
he  would  never  think  of  doing  singly.  The 
fact  may  be  accepted,  but  the  reasoning 
raises  a  doubt.  The  numskull  runs  amuck 
in  a  crowd,  not  because  he  has  been  inocu 
lated  with  new  rascality  by  the  mysteri 
ous  crowd  influence,  but  because  his  hab 
itual  rascality  now  has  its  only  chance  to 
function  safely.  In  other  words,  the  num 
skull  is  vicious,  but  a  poltroon.  He  re 
frains  from  all  attempts  at  lynching 
a  cappella,  not  because  it  takes  suggestion 
to  make  him  desire  to  lynch,  but  because 
it  takes  the  protection  of  a  crowd  to  make 
him  brave  enough  to  try  it. 

What  happens  when  a  crowd  cuts  loose 
is  not  quite  what  Le  Bon  and  his  follow 
ers  describe.  The  few  superior  men  in  it 
are  not  straightway  reduced  to  the  level 
of  the  underlying  stoneheads.  On  the  con 
trary,  they  usually  keep  their  heads,  and 
often  make  efforts  to  combat  the  crowd 
action.  But  the  stoneheads  are  too  many 

65 


for  them;  the  fence  is  torn  down  or  the 
blackamoor  is  lynched.  And  why?  Not 
because  the  stoneheads,  normally  virtu 
ous,  are  suddenly  criminally  insane.  Nay, 
but  because  they  are  suddenly  conscious 
of  the  power  lying  in  their  numbers — 
because  they  suddenly  realize  that  their 
natural  viciousness  and  insanity  may  be 
safely  permitted  to  function. 

In  other  words,  the  particular  swinish 
ness  of  a  crowd  is  permanently  resident 
in  the  majority  of  its  members — in  all 
those  members,  that  is,  who  are  naturally 
ignorant  and  vicious — perhaps  95  per 
cent.  All  studies  of  mob  psychology  are 
defective  in  that  they  underestimate  this 
viciousness.  They  are  poisoned  by  the 
prevailing  delusion  that  the  lower  orders 
of  men  are  angels.  This  is  nonsense.  The 
lower  orders  of  men  are  incurable  rascals, 
either  individually  or  collectively.  De 
cency,  self-restraint,  the  sense  of  justice, 
courage — these  virtues  belong  only  to  a 
small  minority  of  men.  This  minority 
never  runs  amuck.  Its  most  distinguish- 

66 


ing  character,  in  truth,  is  its  resistance  to 
all  running  amuck.  The  third-rate  man, 
though  he  may  wear  the  false  whiskers  of 
a  first-rate  man,  may  always  be  detected 
by  his  inability  to  keep  his  head  in  the  face 
of  an  appeal  to  his  emotions.  A  whoop 
strips  off  his  disguise. 


67 


XXI 

AN  AMERICAN  PHILOSOPHER 

As  for  William  Jennings  Bryan,  of 
whom  so  much  piffle,  pro  and  con,  has 
been  written,  the  whole  of  his  political 
philosophy  may  be  reduced  to  two  propo 
sitions,  neither  of  which  is  true.  The  first 
is  the  proposition  that  the  common  people 
are  wise  and  honest,  and  the  second  is  the 
proposition  that  all  persons  who  refuse 
to  believe  it  are  scoundrels.  Take  away 
the  two,  and  all  that  would  remain  of  Jen 
nings  would  be  a  somewhat  greasy  bald- 
headed  man  with  his  mouth  open. 


68 


XXII 

CLUBS 

Men's  clubs  have  but  one  intelligible 
purpose :  to  afford  asylum  to  fellows  who 
haven't  any  girls.  Hence  their  general 
gloom,  their  air  of  lost  causes,  their  prevail 
ing  acrimony.  No  man  would  ever  enter 
a  club  if  he  had  an  agreeable  woman  to 
talk  to.  This  is  particularly  true  of  mar 
ried  men.  Those  of  them  that  one  finds 
in  clubs  answer  to  a  general  description : 
they  have  wives  too  unattractive  to  enter 
tain  them,  and  yet  too  watchful  to  allow 
them  to  seek  entertainment  elsewhere. 
The  bachelors,  in  the  main,  belong  to  two 
classes:  (a)  those  who  have  been  unfor 
tunate  in  amour,  and  are  still  too  sore  to 
show  any  new  enterprise,  and  (b)  those  so 
lacking  in  charm  that  no  woman  will  pay 
any  attention  to  them.  Is  it  any  wonder 
that  the  men  one  thus  encounters  in  clubs 
are  stupid  and  miserable  creatures,  and 
that  they  find  their  pleasure  in  such  banal 
sports  as  playing  cards,  drinking  high- 

69 


balls,  shooting  pool,  and  reading  the 
barber-shop  weeklies?  . . .  The  day  a  man's 
mistress  is  married  one  always  finds  him 
at  his  club. 


70 


XXIII 

FIDELIS  AD  URNUM 

Despite  the  common  belief  of  women  to 
the  contrary,  fully  95  per  cent,  of  all  mar 
ried  men,  at  least  in  America,  are  faith 
ful  to  their  wives.  This,  however,  is  not 
due  to  virtue,  but  chiefly  to  lack  of  cour 
age.  It  takes  more  initiative  and  daring 
to  start  up  an  extra-legal  affair  than  most 
men  are  capable  of.  They  look  and  they 
make  plans,  but  that  is  as  far  as  they  get. 
Another  salient  cause  of  connubial  recti 
tude  is  lack  of  means.  A  mistress  costs  a 
great  deal  more  than  a  wife;  in  the  open 
market  of  the  world  she  can  get  more.  It 
is  only  the  rare  man  who  can  conceal 
enough  of  his  income  from  his  wife  to  pay 
for  a  morganatic  affair.  And  most  of  the 
men  clever  enough  to  do  this  are  too 
clever  to  be  intrigued. 

I  have  said  that  95  per  cent,  of  married 
men  are  faithful.  I  believe  the  real  pro 
portion  is  nearer  99  per  cent.  What 
women  mistake  for  infidelity  is  usually  no 

71 


more  than  vanity.  Every  man  likes  to  be 
regarded  as  a  devil  of  a  fellow,  and  par 
ticularly  by  his  wife.  On  the  one  hand, 
it  diverts  her  attention  from  his  more  gen 
uine  shortcomings,  and  on  the  other  hand 
it  increases  her  respect  for  him.  More 
over,  it  gives  her  a  chance  to  win  the  sym 
pathy  of  other  women,  and  so  satisfies  that 
craving  for  martyrdom  which  is  perhaps 
woman's  strongest  characteristic.  A 
woman  who  never  has  any  chance  to  sus 
pect  her  husband  feels  cheated  and  humil 
iated.  She  is  in  the  position  of  those 
patriots  who  are  induced  to  enlist  for  a 
war  by  pictures  of  cavalry  charges,  and 
then  find  themselves  told  off  to  wash  the 
general's  underwear. 


72 


XXIV 
A  THEOLOGICAL  MYSTERY 

The  moral  order  of  the  world  runs 
aground  on  hay  fever.  Of  what  use  is  it? 
Why  was  it  invented?  Cancer  and  hydro 
phobia,  at  least,  may  be  defended  on  the 
ground  that  they  kill.  Killing  may  have 
some  benign  purpose,  some  esoteric  sig 
nificance,  some  cosmic  use.  But  hay  fever 
never  kills;  it  merely  tortures.  No  man 
ever  died  of  it.  Is  the  torture,  then,  an 
end  in  itself?  Does  it  break  the  pride  of 
strutting,  snorting  man,  and  turn  his  heart 
to  the  things  of  the  spirit?  Nonsense!  A 
man  with  hay  fever  is  a  natural  criminal. 
He  curses  the  gods,  and  defies  them  to 
kill  him.  He  even  curses  the  devil.  Is 
its  use,  then,  to  prepare  him  for  happiness 
to  come — for  the  vast  ease  and  comfort 
of  convalescence?  Nonsense  again  1  The 
one  thing  he  is  sure  of,  the  one  thing  he 
never  forgets  for  a  moment,  is  that  it  will 
come  back  again  next  year. 


73 


XXV 

THE  TEST  OF  TRUTH 

The  final  test  of  truth  is  ridicule.  Very 
few  religious  dogmas  have  ever  faced  it 
and  survived.  Huxley  laughed  the  devils 
out  of  the  Gadarene  swine.  Dowie's  whis 
kers  broke  the  back  of  Dowieism.  Not  the 
laws  of  the  United  States  but  the  mother- 
in-law  joke  brought  the  Mormons  to  com 
promise  and  surrender.  Not  the  horror 
of  it  but  the  absurdity  of  it  killed  the  doc 
trine  of  infant  damnation.  .  .  .  But  the 
razor  edge  of  ridicule  is  turned  by  the 
tough  hide  of  truth.  How  loudly  the 
barber-surgeons  laughed  at  Harvey — and 
how  vainly!  What  clown  ever  brought 
down  the  house  like  Galileo?  Or  Colum 
bus?  Or  Jenner?  Or  Lincoln?  Or  Dar 
win?  .  .  .  They  are  laughing  at  Nietzsche 
yet.  .  .  . 


74 


XXVI 

LITERARY  INDECENCIES 

The  low,  graceless  humor  of  names! 
On  my  shelf  of  poetry,  arranged  by  the 
alphabet,  Coleridge  and  J.  Gordon  Coog- 
lar  are  next-door  neighbors!  Mrs. 
Hemans  is  beside  Laurence  Hope!  Walt 
Whitman  rubs  elbows  with  Ella  Wheeler 
Wilcox;  Robert  Browning  with  Richard 
Burton;  Rosetti  with  Cale  Young  Rice; 
Shelley  with  Clinton  Scollard;  Words 
worth  with  George  E.  Woodberry;  John 
Keats  with  Herbert  Kaufman! 

Ibsen,  on  the  shelf  of  dramatists,  is  be 
tween  Victor  Hugo  and  Jerome  K.  Jer 
ome.  Sudermann  follows  Harriet 
Beecher  Stowe.  Maeterlinck  shoulders 
Percy  Mackaye.  Shakespeare  is  between 
Sardou  and  Shaw.  Euripides  and  Clyde 
Fitch!  Upton  Sinclair  and  Sophocles! 
Aeschylus  and  F.  Anstey!  D'Annunzio 
and  Richard  Harding  Davis!  Augustus 
Thomas  and  Tolstoi! 

More    alphabetical    humor.     Gerhart 

75 


Hauptman  and  Robert  Hichens;  Voltaire 
and  Henry  Van  Dyke;  Flaubert  and 
John  Fox,  Jr. ;  Balzac  and  John  Kendrick 
Bangs;  Ostrovsky  and  E.  Phillips  Oppen- 
heim;  Elinor  Glyn  and  Theophile  Gau- 
tier;  Joseph  Conrad  and  Robert  W. 
Chambers;  Zola  and  Zangwill!  .  .  . 

Midway  of  my  scant  shelf  of  novels, 
between  George  Moore  and  Frank  Nor- 
ris,  there  is  just  room  enough  for  the  three 
volumes  of  "Derringforth,"  by  Frank  A. 
Munsey. 


76 


XXVII 

VIRTUOUS  VANDALISM 

A  hearing  of  Schumann's  B  flat  sym 
phony  of  late,  otherwise  a  very  caressing 
experience,  was  corrupted  by  the  thought 
that  music  would  be  much  the  gainer  if 
musicians  could  get  over  their  supersti 
tious  reverence  for  the  mere  text  of  the 
musical  classics.  That  reverence,  indeed, 
is  already  subject  to  certain  limitations; 
hands  have  been  laid,  at  one  time  or  an 
other,  upon  most  of  the  immortal  orato 
rios,  and  even  the  awful  name  of  Bach 
has  not  dissuaded  certain  German  editors. 
But  it  still  swathes  the  standard  sym 
phonies  like  some  vast  armor  of  rubber 
and  angel  food,  and  so  imagination  has  to 
come  to  the  aid  of  the  flutes  and  fiddles 
when  the  band  plays  Schumann,  Mozart, 
and  even  parts  of  Beethoven.  One  dis 
cerns,  often  quite  clearly,  what  the  rever 
end  Master  was  aiming  at,  but  just  as 
often  one  fails  to  hear  it  in  precise  tones. 

This  is  particularly  true  of  Schumann, 

77 


whose  deficiency  in  instrumental  cunning 
has  passed  into  proverb.  And  in  the  B  flat 
symphony,  his  first  venture  into  the  epic 
form,  his  failures  are  most  numerous. 
More  than  once,  obviously  attempting  to 
roll  up  tone  into  a  moving  climax,  he 
succeeds  only  in  muddling  his  colors.  I 
remember  one  place — at  the  moment  I 
can't  recall  where  it  is — where  the  strings 
and  the  brass  storm  at  one  another  in  furi 
ous  figures.  The  blast  of  the  brass,  as  the 
vaudevillains  say,  gets  across — but  the 
fiddles  merely  scream  absurdly.  The 
whole  passage  suggests  the  bleating  of 
sheep  in  the  midst  of  a  vast  bellowing  of 
bulls.  Schumann  overestimated  the  horse 
power  of  fiddle  music  so  far  up  the  E 
string — or  underestimated  the  full  thrust 
of  the  trumpets.  .  .  .  Other  such  soft  spots 
are  well  known. 

Why,  then,  go  on  parroting  gaucheries 
that  Schumann  himself,  were  he  alive 
today,  would  have  long  since  corrected? 
Why  not  call  an  ecumenical  council,  ap 
point  a  commission  to  see  to  such  things, 

78 


and  then  forget  the  sacrilege?  As  a  self- 
elected  delegate  from  partibus  infidelium, 
I  nominate  Dr.  Richard  Strauss  as  chair 
man.  When  all  is  said  and  done,  Strauss 
probably  knows  more  about  writing  for 
orchestra  than  any  other  two  men  that 
ever  lived,  not  excluding  Wagner.  Surely 
no  living  rival  has  anything  to  teach  him. 
If,  after  hearing  a  new  composition  by 
Strauss,  one  turns  to  the  music,  one  is  in 
variably  surprised  to  find  how  simple  it 
is.  The  performance  reveals  so  many 
purple  moments,  so  staggering  an  array 
of  lusciousness,  that  the  ear  is  bemused 
into  detecting  scales  and  chords  that  never 
were  on  land  or  sea.  What  the  explora 
tory  eye  subsequently  discovers,  perhaps, 
is  no  more  than  our  stout  and  comfortable 
old  friend,  the  highly  well-born  Haus- 
frau,  Mme.  C  Dur — with  a  vine  leaf  or 
two  of  C  sharp  minor  or  F  major  in  her 
hair.  The  trick  lies  in  the  tone-color — in 
the  flabbergasting  magic  of  the  orchestra 
tion.  There  are  some  moments  in  "Elek- 
tra"  when  sounds  come  out  of  the  orches- 

79 


tra  that  tug  at  the  very  roots  of  the  hair, 
sounds  so  unearthly  that  they  suggest  a 
caroling  of  dragons  or  Bierfisch — and  yet 
they  are  made  by  the  same  old  fiddles  that 
play  the  Kaiser  Quartette,  and  by  the 
same  old  trombones  that  the  Valkyrie  ride 
like  witch's  broomsticks,  and  by  the  same 
old  flutes  that  sob  and  snuffle  in  TitTs 
Serenade.  And  in  parts  of  "Feuersnot" — 
but  Roget  must  be  rewritten  by  Strauss 
before  "Feuersnot"  is  described.  There  is 
one  place  where  the  harps,  taking  a  run 
ning  start  from  the  scrolls  of  the  violins, 
leap  slambang  through  (or  is  it  into?)  the 
firmament  of  Heaven.  Once,  when  I 
heard  this  passage  played  at  a  concert,  a 
fat  woman  sitting  beside  me  rolled  over 
like  a  perfumed  ox,  and  had  to  be  hauled 
out  by  the  ushers. 

Yes;  Strauss  is  the  man  to  reorchestrate 
the  symphonies  of  Schumann,  particu 
larly  the  B  flat  and  the  Fourth.  I  doubt 
that  he  could  do  much  with  Schubert, 
for  Schubert,  though  he  is  dead  nearly  a 
hundred  years,  yet  remains  curiously  mod- 

80 


ern.  The  Unfinished  symphony  is  full  of 
exquisite  color  effects— consider,  for  exam 
ple,  the  rustling  figure  for  the  strings  in 
the  first  movement — and  as  for  the  C 
major,  it  is  so  stupendous  a  debauch  of 
melodic  and  harmonic  beauty  that  one 
scarcely  notices  the  colors  at  all.  In  its 
slow  movement  mere  loveliness  in  music 
probably  says  all  that  will  ever  be  said. 
.  .  .  But  what  of  old  Ludwig?  Har,  har; 
here  we  begin  pulling  the  whiskers  of 
Baal  Himself.  Nevertheless,  I  am  vandal 
enough  to  wonder,  on  sad  Sunday  morn 
ings,  what  Strauss  could  do  with  the  first 
movement  of  the  C  minor.  More,  if 
Strauss  ever  does  it  and  lets  me  hear  the 
result  just  once,  I'll  be  glad  to  serve  six 
months  in  jail  with  him.  .  .  .  But  in  Mu 
nich,  of  course!  And  with  a  daily  visitor's 
pass  for  Cousin  Pschorr!  . .  . 


81 


XXVIII 

A  FOOTNOTE  ON  THE  DUEL  OF  SEX 

If  I  were  a  woman  I  should  want  to  be 
a  blonde,  with  golden,  silky  hair,  pink 
cheeks  and  sky-blue  eyes.  It  would  not 
bother  me  to  think  that  this  color  scheme 
was  mistaken  by  the  world  for  a  flaunting 
badge  of  stupidity;  I  would  have  a  better 
arm  in  my  arsenal  than  mere  intelligence ; 
I  would  get  a  husband  by  easy  surrender 
while  the  brunettes  attempted  it  vainly  by 
frontal  assault. 

Men  are  not  easily  taken  by  frontal 
assault;  it  is  only  strategem  that  can 
quickly  knock  them  down.  To  be  a 
blonde,  pink,  soft  and  delicate,  is  to  be  a 
strategem.  It  is  to  be  a  ruse,  a  feint,  an 
ambush.  It  is  to  fight  under  the  Red 
Cross  flag.  A  man  sees  nothing  alert  and 
designing  in  those  pale,  crystalline  eyes; 
he  sees  only  something  helpless,  childish, 
weak;  something  that  calls  to  his  compas 
sion;  something  that  appeals  powerfully 
to  his  conceit  in  his  own  strength.  And 

82 


so  he  is  taken  before  he  knows  that  there 
is  a  war.  He  lifts  his  portcullis  in  Chris 
tian  charity — and  the  enemy  is  in  his 
citadel. 

The  brunette  can  make  no  such  stealthy 
and  sure  attack.  No  matter  how  subtle 
her  art,  she  can  never  hope  to  quite  con 
ceal  her  intent.  Her  eyes  give  her  away. 
They  flash  and  glitter.  They  have  depths. 
They  draw  the  male  gaze  into  mysterious 
and  sinister  recesses.  And  so  the  male  be 
hind  the  gaze  flies  to  arms.  He  may  be 
taken  in  the  end — indeed,  he  usually  is— 
but  he  is  not  taken  by  surprise;  he  is  not 
taken  without  a  fight.  A  brunette  has  to 
battle  for  every  inch  of  her  advance.  She  is 
conf  onted  by  an  endless  succession  of  Dead 
Man's  Hills,  each  equipped  with  tele 
scopes,  semaphores,  alarm  gongs,  wireless. 
The  male  sees  her  clearly  through  her  dens 
est  smoke  clouds.  .  .  .  But  the  blonde  cap 
tures  him  under  a  flag  of  truce.  He  regards 
her  tenderly,  kindly,  almost  pityingly, 
until  the  moment  the  gyves  are  upon  his 
wrists. 

83 


It  is  all  an  optical  matter,  a  question  of 
color.  The  pastel  shades  deceive  him;  the 
louder  hues  send  him  to  his  artillery.  God 
help,  I  say,  the  red-haired  girl!  She  goes 
into  action  with  warning  pennants  flying. 
The  dullest,  blindest  man  can  see  her  a 
mile  away;  he  can  catch  the  alarming  flash 
of  her  hair  long  before  he  can  see  the 
whites,  or  even  the  terrible  red-browns, 
of  her  eyes.  She  has  a  long  field  to  cross, 
heavily  under  defensive  fire,  before  she 
can  get  into  rifle  range.  Her  quarry  has 
a  chance  to  throw  up  redoubts,  to  dig  him 
self  in,  to  call  for  reinforcements,  to  elude 
her  by  ignominious  flight.  She  must  win, 
if  she  is  to  win  at  all,  by  an  unparalleled 
combination  of  craft  and  resolution.  She 
must  be  swift,  daring,  merciless.  Even 
the  brunette  of  black  and  penetrating  eye 
has  great  advantages  over  her.  No  won 
der  she  never  lets  go,  once  her  arms  are 
around  her  antagonist's  neck!  No  won 
der  she  is,  of  all  women,  the  hardest  to 
shake  off! 

All  nature  works  in  circles.   Causes  be- 

84 


come  effects;  effects  develop  into  causes. 
The  red-haired  girl's  dire  need  of  cour 
age  and  cunning  has  augmented  her  store 
of  those  qualities  by  the  law  of  natural 
selection.  She  is,  by  long  odds,  the  most 
intelligent  and  bemusing  of  women.  She 
shows  cunning,  foresight,  technique, 
variety.  She  always  fails  a  dozen  times 
before  she  succeeds;  but  she  brings  to  the 
final  business  the  abominable  expertness 
of  a  Ludendorff ;  she  has  learnt  painfully 
by  the  process  of  trial  and  error.  Red- 
haired  girls  are  intellectual  stimulants. 
They  know  all  the  tricks.  They  are  so 
clever  that  they  have  even  cast  a  false 
glamour  of  beauty  about  their  worst  de-  ft 
feet — their  harsh  and  gaudy  hair.  They 
give  it  euphemistic  and  deceitful  names — 
auburn,  bronze,  Titian.  They  overcome 
by  their  hellish  arts  that  deep-seated  dread 
of  red  which  is  inborn  in  all  of  God's 
creatures.  They  charm  men  with  what 
would  even  alarm  bulls. 

And  the  blondes,  by  following  the  law 
of  least  resistance,  have  gone  in  the  other 

85 


direction.  The  great  majority  of  them — 
I  speak,  of  course,  of  natural  blondes;  not 
of  the  immoral  wenches  who  work  their 
atrocities  under  cover  of  a  synthetic 
blondeness — are  quite  as  shallow  and 
stupid  as  they  look.  One  seldom  hears  a 
blonde  say  anything  worth  hearing;  the 
most  they  commonly  achieve  is  a  specious, 
baby-like  prattling,  an  infantile  artless- 
ness.  But  let  us  not  blame  them  for  na 
ture's  work.  Why,  after  all,  be  intelli 
gent?  It  is,  at  best,  no  more  than  a  capac 
ity  for  unhappiness.  The  blonde  not  only 
doesn't  miss  it;  she  is  even  better  off  with 
out  it.  What  imaginable  intelligence 
•  could  compensate  her  for  the  flat  blue- 
ness  of  her  eyes,  the  xanthous  pallor  of 
her  hair,  the  doll-like  pink  of  her  cheeks? 
What  conceivable  cunning  could  do  such 
execution  as  her  stupendous  appeal  to 
masculine  vanity,  sentimentality,  egoism? 
If  I  were  a  woman  I  should  want  to  be 
a  blonde.  My  blondeness  might  be  hid 
eous,  but  it  would  get  me  a  husband,  and 
it  would  make  him  cherish  me  and  love 
me.  86 


XXIX 

ALCOHOL 

Envy,  as  I  have  said,  is  at  the  heart  of 
the  messianic  delusion,  the  mania  to  con-  \^ 
vert  the  happy  sinner  into  a  "good"  man,  • 
and  so  make  him  miserable.  And  at  the 
heart  of  that  envy  is  fear — the  fear  to  sin, 
to  take  a  chance,  to  monkey  with  the  buzz- 
saw.  This  ineradicable  fear  is  the  out 
standing  mark  of  the  fifth-rate  man,  at 
all  times  and  everywhere.  It  dominates 
his  politics,  his  theology,  his  whole  think 
ing.  He  is  a  moral  fellow  because  he  is 
afraid  to  venture  over  the  fence — and  he 
hates  the  man  who  is  not. 

The  solemn  proofs,  so  laboriously  de 
duced  from  life  insurance  statistics,  that 
the  man  who  uses  alcohol,  even  moder 
ately,  dies  slightly  sooner  than  the  tee 
totaler — these  proofs  merely  show  that 
this  man  is  one  who  leads  an  active  and 
vigorous  life,  and  so  faces  hazards  and 
uses  himself  up — in  brief,  one  who  lives 
at  high  tempo  and  with  full  joy,  what 

87 


Nietzsche  used  to  call  the  Ja-Sager,  or 
yes-sayer.  He  may,  in  fact,  die  slightly 
sooner  than  the  teetotaler,  but  he  lives  in 
finitely  longer.  Moreover,  his  life, 
humanly  speaking,  is  much  more  worth 
while,  to  himself  and  to  the  race.  He 
does  the  hard  and  dangerous  work  of  the 
world,  he  takes  the  chances,  he  makes  the 
experiments.  He  is  the  soldier,  the  artist, 
the  innovator,  the  lover.  All  the  great 
works  of  man  have  been  done  by  men 
who  thus  lived  joyously,  strenuously,  and 
perhaps  a  bit  dangerously.  They  have 
never  been  concerned  about  stretching  life 
for  two  or  three  more  years;  they  have 
been  concerned  about  making  life  engross 
ing  and  stimulating  and  a  high  adventure 
while  it  lasts.  Teetotalism  is  as  impossible 
to  such  men  as  any  other  manifestation 
of  cowardice,  and,  if  it  were  possible,  it 
would  destroy  their  utility  and  signif 
icance  just  as  certainly. 

A  man  who  shrinks  from  a  cocktail  be 
fore  dinner  on  the  ground  it  may  flab 
bergast  his  hormones,  and  so  make  him 

88 


die  at  69  years,  ten  months  and  five  days 
instead  of  at  69  years,  eleven  months  and 
seven  days,  such  a  man  is  as  absurd  a  pol 
troon  as  the  fellow  who  shrinks  from  kiss 
ing  a  woman  on  the  ground  that  she  may 
floor  him  with  a  chair  leg.  Each  flees  from  ; 
a  purely  theoretical  risk.  Each  is  a  use-  *\ 
less  encumberer  of  the  earth,  and  the 
sooner  dead  the  better.  Each  is  a  dis 
credit  to  the  human  race,  already  discred 
itable  enough,  God  knows. 

Teetotalism  does  not  make  for  human 
happiness;  it  makes  for  the  dull,  idiotic 
happiness  of  the  barnyard.  The  men  who 
do  things  in  the  world,  the  men  worthy 
of  admiration  and  imitation  are  men  con 
stitutionally  incapable  of  any  such  peck- 
sniffian  stupidity.  Their  ideal  is  not  a 
safe  life,  but  a  full  life;  they  do  not  try 
to  follow  the  canary  bird  in  a  cage,  but 
the  eagle  in  the  air.  And  in  particular 
they  do  not  flee  from  shadows  and  bug 
aboos.  The  alcohol  myth  is  such  a 
bugaboo.  The  sort  of  man  it  scares  is  the 

89 


sort  of  man  whose  chief  mark  is  that  he 
is  always  scared. 

No  wonder  the  Rockefellers  and  their 
like  are  hot  for  saving  the  workingman 
from  John  Barleycorn!  Imagine  the  ad 
vantage  to  them  of  operating  upon  a 
flabby  horde  of  timorous  and  joyless 
slaves,  afraid  of  all  fun  and  kicking  up, 
horribly  moral,  eager  only  to  live  as  long 
as  possible!  What  mule-like  fidelity  and 
efficiency  could  be  got  out  of  such  a 
rabble!  But  how  many  Lincolns  would 
you  get  out  of  it,  and  how  many  Jacksons, 
and  how  many  Grants? 


90 


XXX 

THOUGHTS  ON  THE  VOLUPTUOUS 

Why  has  no  publisher  ever  thought  of 
perfuming  his  novels?  The  final  refine 
ment  of  publishing,  already  bedizened  by 
every  other  art!  Barabbas  turned  Petro- 
nius!  For  instance,  consider  the  bucolic 
romances  of  the  hyphenated  Mrs.  Porter. 
They  have  a  subtle  flavor  of  new-mown 
hay  and  daffodils  already;  why  not  add 
the  actual  essence,  or  at  all  events  some 
safe  coal-tar  substitute,  and  so  help 
imagination  to  spread  its  wings?  For 
Hall  Caine,  musk  and  synthetic  bergamot. 
For  Mrs.  Glyn  and  her  neighbors  on  the 
tiger-skin,  the  fragrant  blood  of  the  red, 
red  rose.  For  the  ruffianish  pages  of  Jack 
London,  the  pungent,  hospitable  smell  of 
a  first-class  bar-room — that  indescribable 
mingling  of  Maryland  rye,  cigar  smoke, 
stale  malt  liquor,  radishes,  potato  salad 
and  Blutwurst.  For  the  Dartmoor  sagas 
of  the  interminable  Phillpotts,  the  warm 
ammoniacal  bouquet  of  cows,  poultry  and 

91 


yokels.  For  the  "Dodo"  school,  violets 
and  Russian  cigarettes.  For  the  venerable 
Howells,  lavender  and  mignonette.  For 
Zola,  Rochefort  and  wet  leather.  For 
Mrs.  Humphrey  Ward,  lilies  of  the  val 
ley.  For  Marie  Corelli,  tuberoses  and 
embalming  fluid.  For  Chambers,  sachet 

and  lip  paint.    For 

But  I  leave  you  to  make  your  own 
choices.  All  I  offer  is  the  general  idea. 
It  has  been  tried  in  the  theatre.  Well  do 
I  remember  the  first  weeks  of  "Floro- 
dora"  at  the  old  Casino,  with  a  mannikin 
in  the  lobby  squirting  "La  Flor  de  Floro- 
dora"  upon  all  us  Florodorans.  ...  I  was 
put  on  trial  for  my  life  when  I  got  home! 


92 


XXXI 

THE  HOLY  ESTATE 

Marriage  is  always  a  man's  second 
choice.  It  is  entered  upon,  more  often  y 
than  not,  as  the  safest  form  of  intrigue. 
The  caitiff  yields  quickest;  the  man  who 
loves  danger  and  adventure  holds  out 
longest.  Behind  it  one  frequently  finds, 
not  that  lofty  romantic  passion  which 
poets  hymn,  but  a  mere  yearning  for  peace 
and  security.  The  abominable  hazards 
of  the  high  seas,  the  rough  humors  and 
pestilences  of  the  forecastle — these  drive 
the  timid  mariner  ashore. . . .  The  authen 
tic  Cupid,  at  least  in  Christendom,  was 
discovered  by  the  late  Albert  Ludwig 
Siegmund  Neisser  in  1879. 


93 


XXXII 

DlCHTUNG  UND  WAHRHEIT 

Deponent,  being  duly  sworn,  saith: 
My  taste  in  poetry  is  for  delicate  and 
fragile  things — to  be  honest,  for  artificial 
things.  I  like  a  frail  but  perfectly  artic 
ulated  stanza,  a  sonnet  wrought  like  ivory, 
a  song  full  of  glowing  nouns,  verbs,  ad 
jectives,  adverbs,  pronouns,  conjunctions, 
prepositions  and  participles,  but  without 
too  much  hard  sense  to  it.  Poetry,  to  me, 
has  but  two  meanings.  On  the  one  hand, 
it  is  a  magical  escape  from  the  sordidness 
of  metabolism  and  the  class  war,  and  on 
the  other  hand  it  is  a  subtle,  very  difficult 
and  hence  very  charming  art,  like  writing 
fugues  or  mixing  mayonnaise.  I  do  not 
go  to  poets  to  be  taught  anything,  or  to 
be  heated  up  to  indignation,  or  to  have  my 
conscience  blasted  out  of  its  torpor,  but  to 
be  soothed  and  caressed,  to  be  lulled  with 
sweet  sounds,  to  be  wooed  into  forgetful- 
ness,  to  be  tickled  under  the  metaphysical 
chin.  My  favorite  poem  is  Lizette  Wood- 

94 


worth  Roose's  "Tears,"  which,  as  a  state 
ment  of  fact,  seems  to  me  to  be  as  idiotic 
as  the  Book  of  Revelation.  The  poetry 
I  regard  least  is  such  stuff  as  that  of  Rob 
ert  Browning  and  Matthew  Arnold, 
which  argues  and  illuminates.  I  dislike 
poetry  of  intellectual  content  as  much  as  I 
dislike  women  of  intellectual  content— 
and  for  the  same  reason. 


95 


XXXIII 

WILD  SHOTS 

If  I  had  the  time,  and  there  were  no 
sweeter  follies  offering,  I  should  like  to 
write  an  essay  on  the  books  that  have  quite 
failed  of  achieving  their  original  pur 
poses,  and  are  yet  of  respectable  use  and 
potency  for  other  purposes.  For  exam 
ple,  the  Book  of  Revelation.  The  obvious 
aim  of  the  learned  author  of  this  work 
was  to  bring  the  early  Christians  into  ac 
cord  by  telling  them  authoritatively  what 
to  expect  and  hope  for;  its  actual  effect 
during  eighteen  hundred  years  has  been 
to  split  them  into  a  multitude  of  camps, 
and  so  set  them  to  denouncing,  damning, 
jailing,  and  murdering  one  another. 
Again,  consider  the  autobiography  of 
Benvenuto  Cellini.  Ben  wrote  it  to  prove 
that  he  was  an  honest  man,  a  mirror  of  all 
the  virtues,  an  injured  innocent;  the 
world,  reading  it,  hails  him  respectfully 
as  the  noblest,  the  boldest,  the  gaudiest 
liar  that  ever  lived.  Again,  turn  to  "Gul- 

96 


liver's  Travels."  The  thing  was  planned 
by  its  rev.  author  as  a  devastating  satire, 
a  terrible  piece  of  cynicism;  it  survives 
as  a  storybook  for  sucklings.  Yet  again, 
there  is  "Hamlet."  Shakespeare  wrote  it 
frankly  to  make  money  for  a  theatrical 
manager;  it  has  lost  money  for  theatrical 
managers  ever  since.  Yet  again,  there  is 
Caesar's  "De  Bello  Gallico."  Julius  com 
posed  it  to  thrill  and  arouse  the  Romans ; 
its  sole  use  today  is  to  stupefy  and  sicken 
schoolboys.  Finally,  there  is  the  cele 
brated  book  of  General  F.  von  Bernhardi. 
He  wrote  it  to  inflame  Germany;  its  effect 

was  to  inflame  England 

The  list  might  be  lengthened  almost  ad 
infinitum.  When  a  man  writes  a  book  he 
fires  a  machine  gun  into  a  wood.  The 
game  he  brings  down  often  astonishes 
him,  and  sometimes  horrifies  him.  Con 
sider  the  case  of  Ibsen. . . .  After  my  book 
on  Nietzsche  I  was  actually  invited  to 
lecture  at  Princeton. 


97 


XXXIV 

BEETHOVEN 

Remain  Holland's  "Beethoven,"  one  of 
the  cornerstones  of  his  celebrity  as  a 
critic,  is  based  upon  a  thesis  that  is  of  al 
most  inconceivable  inaccuracy,  to  wit,  the 
thesis  that  old  Ludwig  was  an  apostle 
of  joy,  and  that  his  music  reveals  his  de 
termination  to  experience  and  utter  it  in 
spite  of  all  the  slings  and  arrows  of  out 
rageous  fortune.  Nothing  could  be  more 
absurd.  Joy,  in  truth,  was  precisely  the 
emotion  that  Beethoven  could  never  con 
jure  up ;  it  simply  was  not  in  him.  Turn 
to  the  scherzo  of  any  of  his  trios,  quartets, 
sonatas  or  symphonies.  A  sardonic  wag- 
gishness  is  there,  and  sometimes  even  a 
wistful  sort  of  merriment,  but  joy  in  the 
real  sense — a  kicking  up  of  legs,  a  light- 
heartedness,  a  complete  freedom  from 
care — is  not  to  be  found.  It  is  in  Haydn, 
it  is  in  Schubert  and  it  is  often  in  Mozart, 
but  it  is  no  more  in  Beethoven  than  it  is  in 
Tchaikovsky.  Even  the  hymn  to  joy  at  the 

98 


end  of  the  Ninth  symphony  narrowly 
escapes  being  a  gruesome  parody  on  the 
thing  itself;  a  conscious  effort  is  in  every 
note  of  it;  it  is  almost  as  lacking  in  spon 
taneity  as  (if  it  were  imaginable  at  all) 
a  piece  of  vers  libre  by  Augustus  Mon 
tague  Toplady. 

Nay;  Ludwig  was  no  leaping  buck. 
Nor  was  it  his  deafness,  nor  poverty,  nor 
the  crimes  of  his  rascally  nephew  that 
pumped  joy  out  of  him.  The  truth  is  that 
he  lacked  it  from  birth;  he  was  born  a 
Puritan — and  though  a  Puritan  may  also 
become  a  great  man  (as  witness  Herbert 
Spencer  and  Beelzebub),  he  can  never 
throw  off  being  a  Puritan.  Beethoven 
stemmed  from  the  Low  Countries,  and  the 
Low  Countries,  in  those  days,  were  full  of 
Puritan  refugees;  the  very  name,  in  its 
first  incarnation,  may  have  been  Bare- 
bones.  If  you  want  to  comprehend  the 
authentic  man,  don't  linger  over  Holland's 
fancies  but  go  to  his  own  philosophizings, 
as  garnered  in  "Beethoven,  the  Man  and 
the  Artist,"  by  Friedrich  Kerst.  Here 

99 


you  will  find  a  collection  of  moral  banal 
ities  that  would  have  delighted  Jonathan 
Edwards — a  collection  that  might  well 
be  emblazoned  on  gilt  cards  and  hung 
in  Sunday  schools.  He  begins  with  a  naif 
anthropomorphism  that  is  now  almost 
perished  from  the  world ;  he  ends  with  a 
solemn  repudiation  of  adultery. .  . .  But  a 
great  man,  my  masters,  a  great  man!  We 
have  enough  biographies  of  him,  and  tal- 
muds  upon  his  works.  Who  will  do  a 
full-length  psychological  study  of  him? 


100 


XXXV 

THE  TONE  ART 

The  notion  that  the  aim  of  art  is  to  fix 
the  shifting  aspects  of  nature,  that  all  art 
is  primarily  representative — this  notion  is 
as  unsound  as  the  theory  that  Friday  is  an 
unlucky  day,  and  is  dying  as  hard.  One 
even  finds  some  trace  of  it  in  Anatole 
France,  surely  a  man  who  should  know 
better.  The  true  function  of  art  is  to  crit 
icise,  embellish  and  edit  nature — partic 
ularly  to  edit  it,  and  so  make  it  coherent 
and  lovely.  The  artist  is  a  sort  of  impas-  \ 
sioned  proof-reader,  blue-pencilling  the  ? 
bad  spelling  of  God.  The  sounds  in  a 
Beethoven  symphony,  even  the  Pastoral, 
are  infinitely  more  orderly,  varied  and 
beautiful  than  those  of  the  woods.  The 
worst  flute  is  never  as  bad  as  the  worst 
soprano.  The  best  violincello  is  immeas 
urably  better  than  the  best  tenor. 

All  first-rate  music  suffers  by  the  fact 
that  it  has  to  be  performed  by  human 
beings — that  is,  that  nature  must  be  per-* 

101 


mitted  to  corrupt  it.  The  performance 
one  hears  in  a  concert  hall  or  opera  house 
is  no  more  than  a  baroque  parody  upon 
the  thing  the  composer  imagined.  In  an 
orchestra  of  eighty  men  there  is  inevit 
ably  at  least  one  man  with  a  sore  thumb, 
or  bad  kidneys,  or  an  anthropophagous 
wife,  or  Katzerjammer  -  -  and  one  is 
enough.  Some  day  the  natural  clumsiness 
and  imperfection  of  fingers,  lips  and 
larynxes  will  be  overcome  by  mechanical 
devices,  and  we  shall  have  Beethoven  and 
Mozart  and  Schubert  in  such  wonderful 
and  perfect  beauty  that  it  will  be  almost 
unbearable.  If  half  as  much  ingenuity 
had  been  lavished  upon  music  machines 
as  has  been  lavished  upon  the  telephone 
and  the  steam  engine,  we  would  have  had 
mechanical  orchestras  long  ago.  Mechan 
ical  pianos  are  already  here.  Piano-play 
ers,  bound  to  put  some  value  on  the  tor 
tures  of  Czerny,  affect  to  laugh  at  all  such 
contrivances,  but  that  is  no  more  than  a 
pale  phosphorescence  of  an  outraged 
Wille  zur  Macht.  Setting  aside  half  a 

102 


dozen — perhaps  a  dozen — great  masters 
of  a  moribund  craft,  who  will  say  that  the 
average  mechanical  piano  is  not  as  com 
petent  as  the  average  pianist? 

When  the  human  performer  of  music 
goes  the  way  of  the  galley-slave,  the  charm 
of  personality,  of  course,  will  be  pumped 
out  of  the  performance  of  music.  But 
the  charm  of  personality  does  not  help 
music;  it  hinders  it.  It  is  not  a  reinforce 
ment  to  music ;  it  is  a  rival.  When  a  beau 
tiful  singer  comes  upon  the  stage,  two 
shows,  as  it  were,  go  on  at  once :  first  the 
music  show,  and  then  the  arms,  shoulders, 
neck,  nose,  ankles,  eyes,  hips,  calves  and 
ruby  lips — in  brief,  the  sex-show.  The 
second  of  these  shows,  to  the  majority  of 
persons  present,  is  more  interesting  than 
the  first — to  the  men  because  of  the  sex 
interest,  and  to  the  women  because  of  the 
professional  or  technical  interest — and  so 
music  is  forced  into  the  background. 
What  it  becomes,  indeed,  is  no  more  than 
a  half-heard  accompaniment  to  an 
imagined  anecdote,  just  as  color,  line  and 

103 


mass  become  mere  accomplishments  to  an 
anecdote  in  a  picture  by  an  English 
academician,  or  by  a  sentimental  German 
of  the  Boecklin  school. 

The  purified  and  dephlogisticated 
music  of  the  future,  to  be  sure,  will  never 
appeal  to  the  mob,  which  will  keep  on 
demanding  its  chance  to  gloat  over  gaudy, 
voluptuous  women,  and  fat,  scandalous 
tenors.  The  moj^  even  disregarding  its 
insatiable  appetite  for  the  improper,  is 
a  natural  hero  worshipper.  It  loves,  not 
the  beautiful,  but  the  strange,  the  unpre 
cedented,  the  astounding;  it  suffers  from 
an  incurable  heliogabalisme.  A  soprano 
who  can  gargle  her  way  up  to  G  sharp  in 
altissimo  interests  it  almost  as  much  as  a 
contralto  who  has  slept  publicly  with  a 
grand  duke.  If  it  cannot  get  the  tenor 
who  receives  $3,000  a  night,  it  will  take 
the  tenor  who  fought  the  manager  with 
bung-starters  last  Tuesday.  But  this  is 
merely  saying  that  the  tastes  and  desires 
of  the  mob  have  nothing  to  do  with  music 
as  an  art.  For  its  ears,  for  its  eyes,  it  de- 

104 


mands  anecdotes — on  the  one  hand  the 
Suicide  symphony,  "The  Forge  in  the 
Forest,"  and  the  general  run  of  Italian 
opera,  and  on  the  other  hand  such  things 
as  'The  Angelus,"  "Playing  Grandpa" 
and  the  so-called  "Mona  Lisa."  It  cannot 
imagine  art  as  devoid  of  moral  content, 
as  beauty  pure  and  simple.  It  always  de 
mands  something  to  edify  it,  or,  failing 
that,  to  shock  it. 

These  concepts,  of  the  edifying  and  the 
shocking,  are  closer  together  in  the  psyche 
than  most  persons  imagine.  The  one,  in 
fact,  depends  upon  the  other:  without 
some  definite  notion  of  the  improving  it 
is  almost  impossible  to  conjure  up  an  ac 
tive  notion  of  the  improper.  All  salacious 
art  is  addressed,  not  to  the  damned,  but 
to  the  consciously  saved;  it  is  Sunday- 
school  superintendents,  not  bartenders, 
who  chiefly  patronize  peep-shows,  and 
know  the  dirty  books,  and  have  a  high 
regard  for  sopranos  of  superior  gluteal 
development.  The  man  who  has  risen 
above  the  petty  ethical  superstitions  of 

105 


Christendom  gets  little  pleasure  out  of  im 
propriety,  for  very  few  ordinary  phenom 
ena  seem  to  him  to  be  improper.  Thus  a 
Frenchman,  viewing  the  undraped  statues 
which  bedizen  his  native  galleries  of  art, 
either  enjoys  them  in  a  purely  aesthetic 
fashion —  which  is  seldom  possible  save 
when  he  is  in  liquor — or  confesses  frankly 
that  he  doesn't  like  them  at  all;  whereas 
the  visiting  Americano  is  so  powerfully 
shocked  and  fascinated  by  them  that  one. 
finds  him,  the  same  evening,  in  places 
where  no  respectable  man  ought  to  go. 
All  art,  to  this  fellow,  must  have  a  certain 
bawdiness,  or  he  cannot  abide  it.  His 
favorite  soprano,  in  the  opera  house,  is 
not  the  fat  and  middle-aged  lady  who  can 
actually  sing,  but  the  girl  with  the  bare 
back  and  translucent  drawers.  Conde 
scending  to  the  concert  hall,  he  is  bored 
by  the  posse  of  enemy  aliens  in  funereal 
black,  and  so  demands  a  vocal  soloist— 
that  is,  a  gaudy  creature  of  such  advanced 
corsetting  that  she  can  make  him  forget 

106 


Bach  for  a  while,  and  turn  his  thoughts 
pleasantly  to  amorous  intrigue. 

In  all  this,  of  course,  there  is  nothing 
new.  Other  and  better  men  have  noted 
the  damage  that  the  personal  equation 
does  to  music,  and  some  of  them  have  even 
sought  ways  out.  For  example,  Richard 
Strauss.  His  so-called  ballet,  "Josefs 
Legend/'  produced  in  Paris  just  before 
the  war,  is  an  attempt  to  write  an  opera 
without  singers.  All  of  the  music  is  in 
the  orchestra;  the  folks  on  the  stage 
merely  go  through  a  pointless  pantomime; 
their  main  function  is  to  entertain  the  eye 
with  shifting  colors.  Thus,  the  romantic 
sentiments  of  Joseph  are  announced,  not 
by  some  eye-rolling  tenor,  but  by  the  first, 
second,  third,  fourth,  fifth,  sixth,  seventh 
and  eighth  violins  (it  is  a  Strauss  score!), 
with  the  incidental  aid  of  the  wood-wind, 
the  brass,  the  percussion  and  the  rest  of 
the  strings.  And  the  heroine's  reply  is 
made,  not  by  a  soprano  with  a  cold,  but 
by  an  honest  man  playing  a  flute.  The 
next  step  will  be  the  substitution  of  mario- 

107 


nettes  for  actors.  The  removal  of  the  or 
chestra  to  a  sort  of  trench,  out  of  sight  of 
the  audience,  is  already  an  accomplished 
fact  at  Munich.  The  end,  perhaps,  will  be 
music  purged  of  its  current  ptomaines. 
In  brief,  music. 


108 


XXXVI 

Zoos 

I  often  wonder  how  much  sound  and 
nourishing  food  is  fed  to  the  animals  in  the 
zoological  gardens  of  America  every 
week,  and  try  to  figure  out  what  the  pub 
lic  gets  in  return  for  the  cost  thereof.  The 
annual  bill  must  surely  run  into  millions; 
one  is  constantly  hearing  how  much  beef 
a  lion  downs  at  a  meal  and  how  many  tons 
of  hay  an  elephant  dispatches  in  a  month. 
And  to  what  end?  To  the  end,  princi 
pally,  that  a  horde  of  superintendents  and 
keepers  may  be  kept  in  easy  jobs.  To  the 
end,  secondarily,  that  the  least  intelligent 
minority  of  the  population  may  have  an 
idiotic  show  to  gape  at  on  Sunday  after 
noons,  and  that  the  young  of  the  species 
may  be  instructed  in  the  methods  of  amour 
prevailing  among  chimpanzees  and  be 
come  privy  to  the  technic  employed  by 
jaguars,  hyenas  and  polar  bears  in  ridding 
themselves  of  lice. 

So  far  as  I  can  make  out,  after  labori- 

109 


ous  visits  to  all  the  chief  zoos  of  the  nation, 
no  other  imaginable  purpose  is  served  by 
their  existence.  One  hears  constantly,  true 
enough  (mainly  from  the  gentlemen  they 
support)  that  they  are  educational.  But 
how?  Just  what  sort  of  instruction  do 
they  radiate,  and  what  is  its  value?  I 
have  never  been  able  to  find  out.  The 
sober  truth  is  that  they  are  no  more  edu 
cational  than  so  many  firemen's  parades 
or  displays  of  sky-rockets,  and  that  all 
they  actually  offer  to  the  public  in  return 
for  the  taxes  wasted  upon  them  is  a  form 
of  idle  and  witless  amusement,  compared 
to  which  a  visit  to  a  penitentiary,  or  even 
to  Congress  or  a  state  legislature  in  session, 
is  informing,  stimulating  and  ennobling. 
Education  your  grandmother!  Show 
me  a  schoolboy  who  has  ever  learned  any 
thing  valuable  or  important  by  watching 
a  mangy  old  lion  snoring  away  in  its  cage 
or  a  family  of  monkeys  fighting  for  pea 
nuts.  To  get  any  useful  instruction  out  of 
such  a  spectacle  is  palpably  impossible; 
not  even  a  college  professor  is  improved 

no 


by  it.  The  most  it  can  imaginably  impart 
is  that  the  stripes  of  a  certain  sort  of  tiger 
run  one  way  and  the  stripes  of  another  sort 
some  other  way,  that  hyenas  and  polecats 
smell  worse  than  Greek  'bus  boys,  that  the 
Latin  name  of  the  raccoon  (who  was  un 
heard  of  by  the  Romans)  is  Procyon  lotor. 
For  the  dissemination  of  such  banal 
knowledge,  absurdly  emitted  and  defec 
tively  taken  in,  the  taxpayers  "of  the 
United  States  are  mulcted  in  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  dollars  a  year.  As  well  make 
them  pay  for  teaching  policemen  the 
theory  of  least  squares,  or  for  instructing 
roosters  in  the  laying  of  eggs. 

But  the  zoos,  it  is  argued,  are  of  scien 
tific  value.  They  enable  learned  men  to 
study  this  or  that.  Again  the  facts  blast 
the  theory.  No  scientific  discovery  of  any 
value  whatsoever,  even  to  the  animals 
themselves,  has  ever  come  out  of  a  zoo. 
The  zoo  scientist  is  the  old  woman  of 
zoology,  and  his  alleged  wisdom  is  usually 
exhibited,  not  in  the  groves  of  actual 
learning,  but  in  the  yellow  journals.  He 

in 


is  to  biology  what  the  late  Camille  Flam- 
marion  was  to  astronomy,  which  is  to  say, 
its  court  jester  and  reductio  ad  absurdum. 
When  he  leaps  into  public  notice  with 
some  new  pearl  of  knowledge,  it  com 
monly  turns  out  to  be  no  more  than  the 
news  that  Marie  BashkirtsefT,  the  Russian 
lady  walrus,  has  had  her  teeth  plugged 
with  zinc  and  is  expecting  twins.  Or  that 
Pishposh,  the  man-eating  alligator,  is 
down  with  locomotor  ataxia.  Or  that 
Damon,  the  grizzly,  has  just  finished  his 
brother  Pythias  in  the  tenth  round,  chew 
ing  off  his  tail,  nose  and  remaining  ear. 
Science,  of  course,  has  its  uses  for  the 
lower  animals.  A  diligent  study  of  their 
livers  and  lights  helps  to  an  understand 
ing  of  the  anatomy  and  physiology,  and 
particularly  of  the  pathology,  of  man. 
They  are  necessary  aids  in  devising  and 
manufacturing  many  remedial  agents, 
and  in  testing  the  virtues  of  those  already 
devised ;  out  of  the  mute  agonies  of  a  rab 
bit  or  a  calf  may  come  relief  for  a  baby 
with  diphtheria,  or  means  for  an  arch- 

112 


deacon  to  escape  the  consequences  of  his 
youthful  follies.  Moreover,  something 
valuable  is  to  be  got  out  of  a  mere  study 
of  their  habits,  instincts  and  ways  of  mind 
— knowledge  that,  by  analogy,  may  illu 
minate  the  parallel  doings  of  the  genus 
homo,  and  so  enable  us  to  comprehend  the 
primitive  mental  processes  of  Congress 
men,  morons  and  the  rev.  clergy. 

But  it  must  be  obvious  that  none  of 
these  studies  can  be  made  in  a  zoo.  The 
zoo  animals,  to  begin  with,  provide  no 
material  for  the  biologist;  he  can  find  out 
no  more  about  their  insides  than  what  he 
discerns  from  a  safe  distance  and  through 
the  bars.  He  is  not  allowed  to  try  his 
germs  and  specifics  upon  them;  he  is  not 
allowed  to  vivisect  them.  If  he  would 
find  out  what  goes  on  in  the  animal  body 
under  this  condition  or  that,  he  must  turn 
from  the  inhabitants  of  the  zoo  to  the  cus 
tomary  guinea  pigs  and  street  dogs,  and 
buy  or  sted  them  for  himself.  Nor  does 
he  get  any  chance  for  profitable  inquiry 
when  zoo  animals  die  (usually  of  lack  of 

113 


exercise  or  ignorant  doctoring),  for  their 
carcasses  are  not  handed  to  him  for 
autopsy,  but  at  once  stuffed  with  gypsum 
and  excelsior  and  placed  in  some  museum. 

Least  of  all  do  zoos  produce  any  new 
knowledge  about  animal  behavior.  Such 
knowledge  must  be  got,  not  from  animals 
penned  up  and  tortured,  but  from  animals 
in  a  state  of  nature.  A  college  professor 
studying  the  habits  of  the  giraffe,  for  ex 
ample,  and  confining  his  observation  to 
specimens  in  zoos,  would  inevitably  come 
to  the  conclusions  that  the  giraffe  is  a  sed 
entary  and  melancholy  beast,  standing  im 
movable  for  hours  at  a  time  and  employ 
ing  an  Italian  to  feed  him  hay  and  cab 
bages.  As  well  proceed  to  a  study  of  the 
psychology  of  a  jurisconsult  by  first  im 
mersing  him  in  Sing  Sing,  or  of  a  juggler 
by  first  cutting  off  his  hands.  Knowledge 
so  gained  is  inaccurate  and  imbecile 
knowledge.  Not  even  a  college  professor, 
if  sober,  would  give  it  any  faith  and 
credit. 

There  remains,  then,  the  only  true  util- 

114 


ity  of  a  zoo :  it  is  a  childish  and  pointless 
show  for  the  unintelligent,  in  brief,  for 
children,  nurse-maids,  visiting  yokels  and 
the  generality  of  the  defective.  Should  the 
taxpayers  be  forced  to  sweat  millions  for 
such  a  purpose?  I  think  not.  The  sort 
of  man  who  likes  to  spend  his  time  watch 
ing  a  cage  of  monkeys  chase  one  another, 
or  a  lion  gnaw  its  tail,  or  a  lizard  catch 
flies,  is  precisely  the  sort  of  man  whose 
mental  weakness  should  be  combatted  at 
the  public  expense,  and  not  fostered.  He 
is  a  public  liability  and  a  public  menace, 
and  society  should  seek  to  improve  him. 
Instead  of  that,  we  spend  a  lot  of  money  to 
feed  his  degrading  appetite  and  further 
paralyze  his  mind.  It  is  precisely  as  if  the 
community  provided  free  champagne  for 
dipsomaniacs,  or  hired  lecturers  to  con 
vert  the  army  to  the  doctrines  of  the  Bol- 
sheviki. 

Of  the  abominable  cruelties  practised 
in  zoos  it  is  unnecessary  to  make  mention. 
Even  assuming  that  all  the  keepers  are 
men  of  delicate  nature  and  ardent  zoo- 

115 


philes  (which  is  about  as  safe  as  assum 
ing  that  the  keepers  of  a  prison  are  all 
sentimentalists,  and  weep  for  the  sorrows 
of  their  charges),  it  must  be  plain  that 
the  work  they  do  involves  an  endless  war 
upon  the  native  instincts  of  the  animals, 
and  that  they  must  thus  inflict  the  most 
abominable  tortures  every  day.  What 
could  be  a  sadder  sight  than  a  tiger  in  a 
cage,  save  it  be  a  forest  monkey  climbing 
despairingly  up  a  barked  stump,  or  an 
eagle  chained  to  its  roost?  How  can  man 
be  benefitted  and  made  better  by  robbing 
the  seal  of  its  arctic  ice,  the  hippopotamus 
of  its  soft  wallow,  the  buffalo  of  its  open 
range,  the  lion  of  its  kingship,  the  birds 
of  their  air? 

I  am  no  sentimentalist,  God  knows.  I 
am  in  favor  of  vivisection  unrestrained, 
so  long  as  the  vivisectionist  knows  what  he 
is  about.  I  advocate  clubbing  a  dog  that 
barks  unnecesarily,  which  all  dogs  do.  I 
enjoy  hangings,  particularly  of  converts 
to  the  evangelical  faiths.  I  once  poisoned 
a  clergyman.  The  crunch  of  a  cockroach 

116 


is  music  to  my  ears.  But  when  the  day 
comes  to  turn  the  prisoners  of  the  zoo  out 
of  their  cages,  if  it  is  only  to  lead  them 
to  the  swifter,  kinder  knife  of  the  schochet, 
I  shall  be  present  and  rejoicing,  and  if 
any  one  present  thinks  to  suggest  that  it 
would  be  a  good  plan  to  celebrate  the 
day  by  shooting  the  whole  zoo  faculty,  I 
shall  have  a  revolver  in  my  pocket  and  a 
sound  eye  in  my  head. 


117 


XXXVII 
ON  HEARING  MOZART 

The  only  permanent  values  in  the 
world  are  truth  and  beauty,  and  of  these  it 
is  probable  that  truth  is  lasting  only  in  so 
far  as  it  is  a  function  and  manifestation 
of  beauty — a  projection  of  feeling  in  terms 
of  idea.  The  world  is  a  charnel  house  of 
dead  religions.  Where  are  all  the  faiths 
of  the  middle  ages,  so  complex  and  yet  so 
precise?  But  all  that  was  essential  in  the 
beauty  of  the  middle  ages  still  lives.  .  . . 

This  is  the  heritage  of  man,  but  not  of 
men.  The  great  majority  of  men  are  not 
even  aware  of  it.  Their  participation  in 
the  progress  of  the  world,  and  even  in  the 
history  of  the  world,  is  infinitely  remote 
and  trivial.  They  live  and  die,  at  bottom, 
as  animals  live  and  die.  The  human  race, 
as  a  race,  is  scarcely  cognizant  of  their  ex 
istence;  they  haven't  even  definite  number, 
but  stand  grouped  together  as  x,  the  quan 
tity  unknown  .  .  .  and  not  worth  knowing. 


118 


XXXVIII 

THE  ROAD  TO  DOUBT 

The  first  effect  of  what  used  to  be  called 
natural  philosophy  is  to  fill  its  devotee  ff 
with  wonder  at  the  marvels  of  God.  This 
explains  why  the  pursuit  of  science,  so 
long  as  it  remains  superficial,  is  not  in 
compatible  with  the  most  naive  sort  of  re 
ligious  faith.  But  the  moment  the  stu 
dent  of  the  sciences  passes  this  stage  of 
childlike  amazement  and  begins  to  inves 
tigate  the  inner  workings  of  natural  phe 
nomena,  he  begins  to  see  how  ineptly 
many  of  them  are  managed,  and  so  he 
tends  to  pass  from  awe  of  the  Creator  to 
criticism  of  the  Creator,  and  once  he  has 
crossed  that  bridge  he  has  ceased  to  be  a 
believer.  One  finds  plenty  of  neighbor 
hood  physicians,  amateur  botanists,  high- 
school  physics  teachers  and  other  such 
quasi-scientists  in  the  pews  on  Sunday,  but 
one  never  sees  a  Huxley  there,  or  a  Dar 
win,  or  an  Ehrlich. 


119 


XXXIX 

A  NEW  USE  FOR  CHURCHES 

The  argument  by  design,  it  may  be 
granted,  establishes  a  reasonable  ground 
for  accepting  the  existence  of  God.  It 
makes  belief,  at  all  events,  quite  as  intel 
ligible  as  unbelief.  But  when  the  theo 
logians  take  their  step  from  the  existence 
of  God  to  the  goodness  of  God  they  tread 
upon  much  less  firm  earth.  How  can  one 
see  any  proof  of  that  goodness  in  the  sense 
less  and  intolerable  sufferings  of  man — his 
helplessness,  the  brief  and  troubled  span 
of  his  life,  the  inexplicable  disproportion 
between  his  deserts  and  his  rewards,  the 
tragedy  of  his  soaring  aspiration,  the 
worse  tragedy  of  his  dumb  questioning? 
Granting  the  existence  of  God,  a  house 
dedicated  to  Him  naturally  follows.  He 
is  all-important;  it  is  fit  that  man  should 
take  some  notice  of  Him.  But  why  praise 
and  flatter  him  for  his  unspeakable  cruel 
ties?  Why  forget  so  supinely  His  failures 
to  remedy  the  easily  remediable?  Why, 

120 


indeed,  devote  the  churches  exclusively  to 
worship?  Why  not  give  them  over,  now 
and  then,  to  justifiable  indignation  meet 
ings? 

Perhaps  men  will  incline  to  this  idea 
later  on.  It  is  not  inconceivable,  indeed, 
that  religion  will  one  day  cease  to  be  a 
poltroonish  acquiescence  and  become  a 
vigorous  and  insistent  criticism.  If  God 
can  hear  a  petition,  what  ground  is  there 
for  holding  that  He  would  not  hear  a 
complaint?  It  might,  indeed,  please  Him 
to  find  His  creatures  grown  so  self-reliant 
and  reflective.  More,  it  might  even  help 
Him  to  get  through  His  infinitely  com 
plex  and  difficult  work.  Theology  has 
already  moved  toward  such  notions.  It 
has  abandoned  the  primitive  doctrine  of 
God's  arbitrariness  and  indifference,  and 
substituted  the  doctrine  that  He  is  willing, 
and  even  eager,  to  hear  the  desires  of  His 
creatures — i.  e.,  their  private  notions,  born 
of  experience,  as  to  what  would  be  best  for 
them.  Why  assume  that  those  notions 
would  be  any  the  less  worth  hearing  and 

121 


heeding  if  they  were  cast  in  the  form  of 
criticism,  and  even  of  denunciation?  Why 
hold  that  the  God  who  can  understand 
and  forgive  even  treason  could  not  under 
stand  and  forgive  remonstrance? 


122 


XL 

THE  ROOT  OF  RELIGION 

The  idea  of  literal  truth  crept  into  re 
ligion  relatively  late:  it  is  the  invention 
of  lawyers,  priests  and  cheese-mongers. 
The  idea  of  mystery  long  preceded  it,  and 
at  the  heart  of  that  idea  of  mystery  was 
an  idea  of  beauty — that  is,  an  idea  that  this 
or  that  view  of  the  celestial  and  infernal 
process  presented  a  satisfying  picture  of 
form,  rhythm  and  organization.  Once 
this  view  was  adopted  as  satisfying,  its 
professional  interpreters  and  their  dupes 
sought  to  reinforce  it  by  declaring  it  true. 
The  same  flowtof  reasoning  is  familiar  on 
lower  planes.  /The  average  man  does  not 
get  pleasure  out  of  an  idea  because  he 
thinks  it  is  true;  he  thinks  it  is  true  be 
cause  he  gets  pleasure  out  of  it.  / 


123 


XLI 

FREE  WILL 

Free  will,  it  appears,  is  still  a  Christian 
dogma.  Without  it  the  cruelties  of  God 
would  strain  faith  to  the  breaking-point. 
But  outside  the  fold  it  is  gradually  falling 
into  decay.  Such  men  of  science  as  George 
W.  Crile  and  Jacques  Loeb  have  dealt  it 
staggering  blows,  and  among  laymen  of 
inquiring  mind  it  seems  to  be  giving  way 
to  an  apologetic  sort  of  determinism — a 
determinism,  one  may  say,  tempered  by 
defective  observation.  The  late  Mark 
Twain,  in  his  secret  heart,  was  such  a  de- 
terminist.  In  his  "What  Is  Man?"  you 
will  find  him  at  his  farewells  to  liberta- 
rianism.  The  vast  majority  of  our  acts,  he 
argues,  are  determined,  but  there  remains 
a  residuum  of  free  choices.  Here  we  stand 
free  of  compulsion  and  face  a  pair  or  more 
of  alternatives,  and  are  free  to  go  this  way 
or  that. 

A  pillow  for  free  will  to  fall  upon — 
but  one  loaded  with  disconcerting  brick- 

124 


bats.  Where  the  occupants  of  this  last 
trench  of  libertarianism  err  is  in  their 
assumption  that  the  pulls  of  their  antagon 
istic  impulses  are  exactly  equal — that  the 
individual  is  absolutely  free  to  choose 
which  one  he  will  yield  to.  Such  freedom, 
in  practise,  is  never  encountered.  When 
an  individual  confronts  alternatives,  it  is 
not  alone  his  volition  that  chooses  between 
them,  but  also  his  environment,  his  in 
herited  prejudices,  his  race,  his  color,  his 
condition  of  servitude.  I  may  kiss  a  girl 
or  I  may  not  kiss  her,  but  surely  it  would 
be  absurd  to  say  that  I  am,  in  any  true 
sense,  a  free  agent  in  the  matter.  The 
world  has  even  put  my  helplessness  into 
a  proverb.  It  says  that  my  decision  and 
act  depend  upon  the  time,  the  place — and 
even  to  some  extent,  upon  the  girl. 

Examples  might  be  multiplied  ad  infin- 
itum.  I  can  scarcely  remember  perform 
ing  a  wholly  voluntary  act.  My  whole 
life,  as  I  look  back  upon  it,  seems  to  be 
a  long  series  of  inexplicable  accidents,  not 
only  quite  unavoidable,  but  even  quite  un- 

125 


intelligible.  Its  history  is  the  history  of 
the  reactions  of  my  personality  to  my  en 
vironment,  of  my  behavior  before  exter 
nal  stimuli.  I  have  been  no  more  respon 
sible  for  that  personality  than  I  have  been 
for  that  environment.  To  say  that  I  can 
change  the  former  by  a  voluntary  effort 
is  as  ridiculous  as  to  say  that  I  can  modify 
the  curvature  of  the  lenses  of  my  eyes.  I 
know,  because  I  have  often  tried  to  change 
it,  and  always  failed.  Nevertheless,  it  has 
changed.  I  am  not  the  same  man  I  was 
in  the  last  century.  But  the  gratifying  im 
provements  so  plainly  visible  are  surely 
not  to  be  credited  to  me.  All  of  them 
came  from  without — or  from  unplumb- 
able  and  uncontrollable  depths  within. 

The  more  the  matter  is  examined  the 
more  the  residuum  of  free  will  shrinks  and 
shrinks,  until  in  the  end  it  is  almost  im 
possible  to  find  it.  A  great  many  men,  of 
course,  looking  at  themselves,  see  it  as 
something  very  large;  they  slap  their 
chests  and  call  themselves  free  agents,  and 
demand  that  God  reward  them  for  their 

126 


virtue.  But  these  fellows  are  simply 
idiotic  egoists,  devoid  of  a  critical  sense. 
They  mistake  the  acts  of  God  for  their 
own  acts.  Of  such  sort  are  the  coxcombs 
who  boast  about  wooing  and  winning 
their  wives.  They  are  brothers  to  the  fox 
who  boasted  that  he  had  made  the  hounds 
run.  .  .  . 

The  throwing  overboard  of  free  will  is 
commonly  denounced  on  the  ground  that 
it  subverts  morality  and  makes  of  religion 
a  mocking.  Such  pious  objections,  of 
course,  are  foreign  to  logic,  but  neverthe 
less,  it  may  be  well  to  give  a  glance  to  this 
one.  It  is  based  upon  the  fallacious 
hypothesis  that  the  determinist  escapes, 
or  hope  to  escape,  the  consequences  of  his 
acts.  Nothing  could  be  more  untrue. 
Consequences  follow  acts  just  as  relent 
lessly  if  the  latter  be  involuntary  as  if  they 
be  voluntary.  If  I  rob  a  bank  of  my  free 
choice  or  in  response  to  some  unfathom 
able  inner  necessity  it  is  all  one;  I  will 
go  to  the  same  jail.  Conscripts  in  war 
are  killed  just  as  often  as  volunteers.  Men 

127 


/who  are  tracked  down  and  shanghaied  by 
their  wives  have  just  as  hard  a  time  of  it 
as  men  who  walk  fatuously  into  the  trap 
by  formally  proposing. 

Even  on  the  ghostly  side,  determinism 
does  not  do  much  damage  to  theology.  It 
is  no  harder  to  believe  that  a  man  will  be 
damned  for  his  involuntary  acts  than  it  is 
to  believe  that  he  will  be  damned  for  his 
voluntary  acts,  for  even  the  supposition 
that  he  is  wholly  free  does  not  dispose  of 
the  massive  fact  that  God  made  him  as  he 
is,  and  that  God  could  have  made  him  a 
saint  if  He  had  so  desired.  To  deny  this 
is  to  flout  omnipotence — a  crime  at  which, 
as  I  have  often  said,  I  balk.  But  here  I 
begin  to  fear  that  I  wade  too  far  into  the 
hot  waters  of  the  sacred  sciences,  and  that 
I  had  better  retire  before  I  lose  my  hide. 
This  prudent  retirement  is  purely  deter 
ministic.  I  do  not  ascribe  it  to  my  own 
sagacity;  I  ascribe  it  wholly  to  that  singu 
lar  kindness  which  fate  always  shows  me. 
If  I  were  free  I'd  probably  keep  on,  and 
then  regret  it  afterward. 

128 


XLII 

QUID  EST  VERITAS? 

All  great  religions,  in  order  to  escape 
absurdity,  have  to  admit  a  dilution  of  ag-  '• 
nosticism.  It  is  only  the  savage,  whether 
of  the  African  bush  or  the  American  gos 
pel  tent,  who  pretends  to  know  the  will 
and  intent  of  God  exactly  and  completely. 
"For  who  hath  known  the  mind  of  the 
Lord?"  asked  Paul  of  the  Romans.  "How 
unsearchable  are  his  judgments,  and  his 
ways  past  rinding  out!"  "It  is  the  glory 
of  God,"  said  Solomon,  "to  conceal  a 
thing."  "Clouds  and  darkness,"  said 
David,  "are  around  him."  "No  man," 
said  the  Preacher,  "can  find  out  the  work 
of  God."  .  .  .  The  difference  between  re 
ligions  is  a  difference  in  their  relative  con 
tent  of  agnosticism.  The  most  satisfying 
and  ecstatic  faith  is  almost  purely  agnos 
tic.  It  trusts  absolutely  without  profess 
ing  to  know  at  all. 


129 


XLIII 

THE  DOUBTER'S  REWARD 

Despite  the  common  delusion  to  the 
contrary  the  philosophy  of  doubt  is  far 
more  comforting  than  that  of  hope.  The 
doubter  escapes  the  worst  penalty  of  the 
man  of  hope ;  he  is  never  disappointed, 
and  hence  never  indignant.  The  inex 
plicable  and  irremediable  may  interest 
him,  but  they  do  not  enrage  him,  or,  I 
may  add,  fool  him.  This  immunity  is 
worth  all  the  dubious  assurances  ever 
foisted  upon  man.  It  is  pragmatically  im 
pregnable.  .  .  .  Moreover,  it  makes  for 
tolerance  and  sympathy.  The  doubter  does 
not  hate  his  opponents;  he  sympathizes 
with  them.  In  the  end,  he  may  even  come 
to  sympathize  with  God. . . .  The  old  idea 
of  fatherhood  here  submerges  in  a  new 
idea  of  brotherhood.  God,  too,  is  beset  by 
limitations,  difficulties,  broken  hopes.  Is 
it  disconcerting  to  think  of  Him  thus? 
Well,  is  it  any  the  less  disconcerting  to 

130 


think  of  Him  as  able  to  ease  and  answer, 
and  yet  failing?  .  .  . 

But  he  that  doubteth — damnatus  est. 
At  once  the  penalty  of  doubt — and  its 
proof,  excuse  and  genesis. 


131 


XLIV 

BEFORE  THE  ALTAR 

A  salient  objection  to  the  prevailing  re 
ligious  ceremonial  lies  in  the  attitudes  of 
abasement  that  it  enforces  upon  the  faith 
ful.  A  man  would  be  thought  a  slimy  and 
knavish  fellow  if  he  approached  any 
human  judge  or  potentate  in  the  manner 
provided  for  approaching  the  Lord  God. 
It  is  an  etiquette  that  involves  loss  of  self- 
respect,  and  hence  it  cannot  be  pleasing 
to  its  object,  for  one  cannot  think  of  the 
Lord  God  as  sacrificing  decent  feelings 
to  mere  vanity.  This  notion  of  abasement, 
like  most  of  the  other  ideas  that  are  gen 
eral  in  the  world,  is  obviously  the  inven 
tion  of  small  and  ignoble  men.  It  is  the 
pollution  of  theology  by  the  Sklaven- 
moral. 


132 


XLV 
THE  MASK 

Ritual  is  to  religion  what  the  music  of 
an  opera  is  to  the  libretto:  ostensibly  a 
means  of  interpretation,  but  actually  a 
means  of  concealment.  The  Presbyteri 
ans  made  the  mistake  of  keeping  the  doc 
trine  of  infant  damnation  in  plain  words. 
As  enlightenment  grew  in  the  world,  in 
telligence  and  prudery  revolted  against  it, 
and  so  it  had  to  be  abandoned.  Had  it 
been  set  to  music  it  would  have  survived— 
uncomprehended,  unsuspected  and  un 
challenged. 


133 


XLVI 

PIA  VENEZIANI,  Poi  CRISTIANI 

I  have  spoken  of  the  possibility  that 
God,  too,  may  suffer  from  a  finite  intelli 
gence,  and  so  know  the  bitter  sting  of  dis 
appointment  and  defeat.  Here  I  yielded 
something  to  politeness;  the  thing  is  not 
only  possible,  but  obvious.  Like  man,  God 
is  deceived  by  appearances  and  probabil 
ities;  He  makes  calculations  that  do  not 
work  out;  He  falls  into  specious  assump 
tions.  For  example,  He  assumed  that 
Adam  and  Eve  would  obey  the  law  in  the 
Garden.  Again,  He  assumed  that  the  ap 
palling  lesson  of  the  Flood  would  make 
men  better.  Yet  again,  He  assumed  that 
men  would  always  put  religion  in  first 
place  among  their  concerns — that  it  would 
be  eternally  possible  to  reach  and  influ 
ence  them  through  it.  This  last  assump 
tion  was  the  most  erroneous  of  them  all. 
The  truth  is  that  the  generality  of  men  have 
long  since  ceased  to  take  religion  seriously. 
When  we  encounter  one  who  still  does  so, 

134 


he  seems  eccentric,  almost  feeble-minded 
—or,  more  commonly,  a  rogue  who  has 
been  deluded  by  his  own  hypocrisy.  Even 
men  who  are  professionaly  religious,  and 
who  thus  have  far  more  incentive  to  stick 
to  religion  than  the  rest  of  us,  nearly  al 
ways  throw  it  overboard  at  the  first  seri 
ous  temptation.  During  the  past  four 
years,  for  example,  Christianity  has  been 
in  combat  with  patriotism  all  over  Chris 
tendom.  Which  has  prevailed?  How 
many  gentlemen  of  God,  having  to  choose 
between  Christ  and  Patrie,  have  actually 
chosen  Christ? 


135 


XLVII 
OFF  AGAIN,  ON  AGAIN 

The  ostensible  object  of  the  Reforma 
tion,  which  lately  reached  its  fourth  cen 
tenary,  was  to  purge  the  Church  of  im 
becilities.  That  object  was  accomplished ; 
the  Church  shook  them  off.  But  imbecil 
ities  make  an  irresistible  appeal  to  man; 
he  inevitably  tries  to  preserve  them  by 
cloaking  them  with  religious  sanctions. 
The  result  is  Protestantism. 


136 


XLVIII 

THEOLOGY 

The  notion  that  theology  is  a  dull  sub 
ject  is  one  of  the  strangest  delusions  of  a 
stupid  and  uncritical  age.  The  truth  is 
that  some  of  the  most  engrossing  books 
ever  written  in  the  world  are  full  of  it. 
For  example,  the  Gospel  according  to 
St.  Luke.  For  example,  Nietzsche's  "Der 
Antichrist."  For  example,  Mark  Twain's 
"What  Is  Man?",  St.  Augustine's  Confes 
sions,  Haeckel's  "The  Riddle  of  the  Uni 
verse,"  and  Huxley's  Essays.  How,  in 
deed,  could  a  thing  be  dull  that  has  sent 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  men — the  very 
best  and  the  very  worst  of  the  race — to  the 
gallows  and  the  stake,  and  made  and 
broken  dynasties,  and  inspired  the  great 
est  of  human  hopes  and  enterprises,  and 
embroiled  whole  continents  in  war?  No, 
theology  is  not  a  soporific.  The  reason  it 
so  often  seems  so  is  that  its  public  exposi 
tion  has  chiefly  fallen,  in  these  later  days, 
into  the  hands  of  a  sect  of  intellectual  cas- 

137 


trati,  who  begin  by  mistaking  it  for  a  sub- 
department  of  etiquette,  and  then  proceed 
to  anoint  it  with  butter,  rose  water  and 
talcum  powder.  Whenever  a  first-rate  in 
tellect  tackles  it,  as  in  the  case  of  Huxley, 
or  in  that  of  Leo  XIII.,  it  at  once  takes 
on  all  the  sinister  fascination  it  had  in 
Luther's  day. 


138 


XLIX 

EXEMPLI  GRATIA 

Do  I  let  the  poor  suffer,  and  consign 
them,  as  old  Friedrich  used  to  say,  to 
statistics  and  the  devil?  Well,  so  does 
God. 


139 


OTHER 

PHILIP 
GOODMAN 

BOOKS 


At  all  Good  Booksellers 

IN  DEFENSE  OF 

WOMEN 

BY  H  •  L  •  MENCKEN 

A  Book  on  Women  ^  *     /^  r 

of  a  New  Sort  Jpl.  J.J 

A   BOOK   WITHOUT 

A   TITLE 

BY  GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN 

Prose  -  poems  in  Q/\ 

Pastel  and  Miniature  VUC 

HOW'S    YOUR 
SECOND    ACT? 

BY  ARTHUR  HOPKINS 

A  Theory  of  the  Theatre  by  Q/Y 

America's  foremost  Producer  yUC 

BOTTOMS    UP 

BY  GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN 

Second  Fainting 
A  Booklet  of  Slapstick 
and  Satire 

PHILIP  GOODMAN  NEW  YORK 


LOAN  PERIOD  ] 
HOME  USE 


2 

5                       '  

3 

-  •— 

6 

be  n&g&tysSSzSSr Desk 

PUEASSrAMPPnRcir>w- 

CML  APR  4    '81 

— 

1QR1 


I8EC261983 


AUTO.  DIS; 


OECO 


t-OAH 


CALIFORNIA,  BERKELEY 
"   ,  CA  94720 

®s 


LD  21A-60m-10,'65 
(F7763slO)476B 


U.C.  BERKELEY  LIBRARIES 


- 


